


In the Dark

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Horror, M/M, Suicide, some gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-10 10:06:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 23,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the lights begin to fail, Babylon-on-Thames begins to fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic that began percolating while I was at 221bcon; it's a dark fic--please heed the warnings. It's horror fic, so....
> 
> All my love goes to rehfan, whose Safe House series prompted me to actually start writing this (because I have so much love for "trapped in one place and forced to cohabitate" fic) and eatingcroutons, my fantastic beta! Any mistakes you find herein are my fault, as I am willful and sometimes sacrifice function in the name of form.

There is no explosion.  Like many of life’s more devastating moments, the quarantine comes silent, sneaking and sudden, and no one anticipates it; no one even suspects that it’s anything but another Q-Branch disaster until the silence has a chance to soak into the walls.  Forty minutes without the hum of the generator kicking back in, someone finally tries the door.

MI6 is full of employees for whom The Company is just that: an office building, with few risks greater than a paper cut—employees whose security clearance is low enough to leave them reeling from the subtle pop-hiss of electricity.  There’s a scream; no one faints.  No one runs.  There’s nowhere to go with a smoldering corpse sprawled in front of the door, plastic shoes melted to the lino to mark where she was standing only moments before.  There’s blood—enough that one of the secretaries retches feebly—the sweet odor of cooked meat, the shattered edge of exposed bone and a spray of flesh across the imposing wooden door and.  Well.  They know who they are, after all.  They know what they do and where.

By the time Barry, the security guard, has finished ushering them through the security gate, word of the problem has begun to filter through to the rest of MI6.  M is quietly summoning division chiefs to his office, anyone who isn’t currently busy or whose absence from their department might be explained away as a meal break; for now, the low-level agents have no idea that something has happened, but it won’t take long.  It’s the IT tech support, the men and women left bitter that their masters-level computer engineering studies have qualified them to get no further than the help desks just beyond the doors and barely a step above the temps, who are left grumbling as the herd of shell-shocked ladies, many of them pensioners, begin to trickle into their already overcrowded space. 

Here beyond the security gate, the power is still on and it’s business as usual; Barry crosses back into the dark of the secretary pool to check for stragglers.  He doesn’t come back.

::

Q lets his head hit the desk in front of him with a thunk.  He’s made a damned fool of himself, that’s what he’s done, and he’s hiding his battered ego in his office with the door shut, pretending to take a late working lunch.  What the hell had possessed—

He busies himself with the code on the screen, fingers flashing over the keyboard.  There’s no point in lingering on it, no point in focusing so blind to the world around, but he can’t help it; three lines into the code he rips his work back out with a frustrated sigh.  Why would he—?  But if he thinks about it, considers the lingering looks and playful banter, he’d considered…clearly.  He’d fooled himself into thinking it was a possibility, into thinking that the attraction, ridiculous enough that he hadn’t known to fight it, was more than just him losing sight of how to be professional.  He’d let himself get carried away with it and asked, and then.

No.  Bond had said no.  Of course he had; Q was ridiculous to have asked in the first place, ridiculous to have hoped or considered or even thought sideways at the idea of Bond—he buries his head under his arms and resolutely gives up the idea of…of _that_.  Forever.  And he’s got no idea what _that_ even was to begin with—friendship?  Companionship?  Sex?  Love?  His forehead hits the desk again and he almost wills the headache that’s forming to coalesce into a concussion.  At least with enough head trauma he might forget—

His phone chimes with a text: Tanner, asking if he’s done lunch yet.  Eyeing his drying egg and cress sandwich balefully, he decides that today might be a day for a three-pint lunch and taps out an acceptance to the invitation.  The response that comes back is from M—boardroom A, ten minutes.  Q’s interest is piqued; this may be the mission to distract him from his catastrophic failure of a love life.  He takes the steps two at a time and steps into the boardroom to a school of still, somber faces.  Something truly dreadful has happened.

::

Technically, James Bond is not supposed to be here today.  “Here” being the operative word—and operative being pivotal in the sense that he is technically supposed to be in Kazakhstan wrapping up a mission, not skulking through the halls of MI6 like a penned beast.  He’s off-radar, has been since Q’s rushed and muffled question: “Bond, would you like to—?” murmured low into the earwig in a way that, from anyone but Q, Bond would have suspected of being an attempt at seduction.  He may or may not technically be rogue right now, but he’d had to come back after that, had to know, and now something is wrong.  He can’t put a finger on it, can’t name that metallic taste on his tongue or scent the difference in the recycled air of the building, but.  Something is wrong.

Granting the elevators down to Q-Branch a wide berth like a coward, Bond skips instead to the barrier between IT and the rest of the building; his badge gets him in easily, and he can usually talk someone who wants to slack off for a bit into loaning him the use of their station.  He’s already reaching into his memory for Tanner’s passwords—and maybe the man should consider leaving his station locked while a card-counter like Bond is around—when he realizes there are more people in the room than ought to be.  There’s a buzzing unhappiness in the air, but no chatter.  He observes a moment and backs away to get a better look.  The situation is unusual, uncomfortable.

It starts as a low crackling in the back of the room, a flicker in the lights that brings genuine worry to the faces of the older ladies huddled in clumps and draws nervous chuckling from even the most world-weary tech.  The power doesn’t go out at MI6.  It just doesn’t, and not in this slow, ominous creep across the room.  In a stuttered wave, the lights go left to right, one by one; then the computers go too, monitors fizzling and creaking before giving up the ghost with soft pops like an air rifle.  The shadows grow, slant, clamber over each other, and Bond watches as they spread like oil.  His gut churns; something is _wrong_. 

“Get out of here,” he says suddenly, unsure why precisely they should go but equally certain that they should, and before the dark gets to the door.  The ladies are meek, biddable, ducking through the door into MI6’s main lobby, the full light dazzling and surreal after the inky dark.  The last of the techs slips though just before the room reaches full dark and Bond slips after him; through the frosted glass door the room is night, the final few computers winking out slowly until the glass is solid black.  Bond is uneasy, a chill forming on his skin like handprints, plucking at him until gooseflesh prickles and his hair is standing on end. 

He thinks he could possibly live with being court-martialed—M needs to know about this.  His movements are brisk as he strides to the stairwell, unable to face the idea of being trapped in a lift with that soupy dark.  Behind, he leaves the low-level employees spinning, lost and dizzy and disoriented in their confusion and grief.  There’s a crackling pop as he closes the door that sounds so familiar; the screams start, and he starts to run.

::

Eve’s heard some version of this “I don’t know what’s going on” speech from M four times now.  Each time he gives it to a new audience, there is slightly more information; the messages popping up on her desktop began slow, but with each one the picture grows clearer and fuzzier at the same time.  They’re dire, all of them.  The perimeter electrified, low level employees in the public entrance taken out like so many mice in a trap, unable to defend themselves as Vauxhall Cross shuts down around them.  Everyday items suddenly become dangerous—one person dead from trying to lift the window sash, another from touching a lamp.  The metal detectors as an invisible fence separating coworkers, friends, colleagues, those captured inside and those captured out.  And power failures, directly at odds with the current that’s charging the points of exit, a wicked blackness that’s more frightening than the sudden shock.  There is a rumour—

Eve isn’t the sort to pay attention to rumour.  It’s not her style; she prefers concrete fact and truth to the fluff of hearsay.  You can touch truth, see it and hear it and taste it, and she’s not going to let herself be concerned about unproven claims when everyone is panicked.  Everyone is frantic.  Danger is creeping into the air, thick and chewing, but if anyone can handle it…, she thinks.  Stop looking at the more fantastic claims, she reminds herself while clearing through the notes that pop up, and follow the ones that can be verified.  Margeary Wallace in the secretary pool: she adds the name to the list of lost.  Barry North: missing.  More people who should never have been in danger gone as the dark sweeps in from the edges.

The door opens with a bang that brings a sharp cry to her lips.  She bites it back by dint of years of training, glancing up at Bond through her lashes as if her hand is not on the gun affixed beneath her desk.  “Double-oh-seven,” she greets, unable to muster the usual tease.  “M’s busy.  You’ll have to come back later.”

“This is important,” he insists, moving to the door; his fingertips glance the handle skittishly, she notices.

“It is.  That’s why the door is locked,” she agrees. 

“This is more important than a budget meeting, Moneypenny.”

“So it is.”

The stalemate is broken when the door opens on its own.  M is speaking low to the Quartermaster, Q’s hands illustrating some climbing thing.  “How many?” he asks.

“Just the one at first.  We need to know it will work,” M replies.  Q nods.

“I need to speak with you,” Bond says, and for a moment both M and Q turn to him with such expectant faces that she doesn’t know which he means.  “M,” Bond clarifies.  Q nods, turning to busy himself with his tablet and they disappear into M’s office.

“What’s that about?” she asks, curious.

“Nothing.”  Q almost sounds disappointed.  “Nothing at all.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, much love for eatingcroutons, who has been beta reading this fic for me and helping me not sound like a raging idiot! Please enjoy.

Jeanette has been a part of MI6 for the last five years.  She’s seen agents come and go, but as far as job security goes, life here in accounting is fairly steady.  There have been exceptions—no one talks about her, even years after her mistake and the Double-oh she’d left behind ghost-eyed—but Jeanette has never envied the agents who put life and limb on the line.  She loves England, but she loves Geordie, too, and suspects that when he finally gets around to using the ring she found in his favorite pair of socks, the ones with the grubby toes and the hole in the heel that he never lets her throw out, she’ll leave Babylon behind for good.  The Office is a good career, but there’s something lovely about the thought of staying home with Geordie’s babies, too.

She’s sitting at her desk when she hears the first screams, and for one terrifying moment it’s the bombings again, whole sheaves of wall coming away from the side of the building thanks to the madman who’d blown them up, but no.  There’s no actual destruction, just the screaming filtering in from the main entrance to the floor; heads begin to pop up over cubicle walls, and from white faces and pressed lips, she knows she’s not the only one thinking of the way the concrete and glass had cracked under the pressure of the explosions, of the way the dying had cried and begged for help under the rubble.  That had been the administrative branch, though, the target the director; this sounds like it’s just beyond the door.  There’s a pounding on the solid oak, and Jeanette glances around.  Murray’s gone cold green, fingers curled tight.

“Don’t touch the doors,” he tells them, and really, you don’t have to tell Jeanette twice.  It looks a little like Dawn of the Dead out there through the bulletproof glass, a smeared red handprint dragging down like that scene in Titanic; she laughs, a little bubble of nerves caught beneath her ribcage, and immediately covers her mouth with both hands.  They’re safe where they are, really.  There’s nothing to worry about.  Murray won’t open the door, and whatever’s on the other side will go away.  Accounting is a stronghold, firesafe and secure from assault; there’s even a bubbler at the back of the room and with all of the snacks snuck into the desks, they’ll be okay for days, if need be.  There aren’t any windows.

Jeanette’s computer makes a whining sound.  The little fan in it is starting to go, has been for months now, but Murray refuses to approve a replacement, and now it gives up in wheezing, gasping breaths.  The system collapses, monitor puffing out like a sob; she raises her hand to report it, but the absurdity strikes her.  She drops her hands to her lap and watches as, to her right, Angie’s does the same.  Then Brian’s.  Trudy’s next, and she begins to realize they’re going slow, up and down the aisles one by one, each defeated sigh growing louder and louder in the still air until all she can hear is frightened breathing.  The bubbler’s gone still, its radiant hum silent.

“Don’t touch the doors,” Murray says again, voice tight.  The lights begin to dim.

Accounting goes silent.  Outside, what’s left of the secretaries and tech support watch the room fall, until there’s not a spark of light, not a sound of life.

::

“I don’t know,” M says, and that’s not good enough.  Bond can’t settle for “I don’t know.” 

“It’s your job to know,” he says sharply.  “You’re head of the Secret Intelligence Service.”

“And it’s your job to do as I tell you, isn’t it, Double-oh-seven?  But you seem to have some difficulty with that, as well,” M shoots back, tone smoothly irritated. 

“What do you know?” Bond demands.  M is aiming at distraction, misdirection, and Bond won’t fall for it—whatever’s going on is strange enough that he won’t forget about it, won’t lose sight of his goal.

M sighs.  “Not much,” he admits.  “All points of entrance and exit to the building are, in essence, closed.  There have been deaths.  Last I’d heard, you were supposed to be in Asia—when did you arrive?”

“Is that important?”

“Insubordination isn’t necessary, Mr. Bond,” M says.  “You may have been the last person to enter the building before it shut down.  The more information we have, the more accurate our timeline and the better we can predict what may happen.”

Bond pauses, considering.  It’s telling, how quickly he arrived, but he’s already on the hook for leaving in the first place—“I arrived just after eleven this morning.  I’ve been in the building since then.”

“And it’s after five.  You left Kazakhstan last night?” M asks neutrally.

“Is that important?” Bond repeats.

“Why?”

“Personal reasons.  The situation was resolved; it wasn’t necessary to stick around.”

“You left the junior agent in the field by himself,” M stated, lifting a brow.

“He’s a grown man.  He can take care of himself.”

“In another situation, I’d be writing the Ministry and removing you from your position,” M says.

“But?”

“But,” M agrees.  “You’re right that this situation is different.  We may find you more useful to have around; for once your complete inability to listen to a damned thing I say may be of benefit.”

“How so?” Bond asks warily.

“I need you to keep an eye on our Quartermaster,” M suggests.

Blood rushes to Bond’s ears, thrumming with his heartbeat and leaving him dizzy.  “What?”

“He’s one of our more important division heads; I’ve set bodyguard detail on most of the others, but the fact is that we’ve too few agents home to keep an eye on each of them.  It’s Q-Branch or accounting, and I’d rather use you for Q-Branch—accounting is too small a room for you, I suspect, and you’d find some way to drive Murray around the bend.  And Q is in the process of developing something to test the nature of our predicament.  I’d like him to be relatively safe while doing that.  We have no idea what’s causing this, but there’s no sense in waiting for it to run its course.”

“Accounting.  I’ll take accounting,” Bond offers, but M just looks at him evenly.

“Any particular reason why?”  Damn.  The chances of M not knowing—for the first time in a long time, Bond feels the start of a flush creeping along his skin.

“I’d prefer—”

Moneypenny chooses this moment to burst into the room, her eyes wide.  “Sir,” she says, without an apology for the interruption, “You need to see this.”  Bond follows behind as she leads M to her desk.  There’s an e-mail up—accounting is offline.  Thirty people trapped inside, and the door is electrified.

::

Tinkering is soothing, smoothing Q’s jangled nerves until he can pretend that his shaking is from caffeine.  It might be, at least in part—he’s had a pot and a half of tea already, and his desiccated sandwich is still sitting uneaten on his desk.  Strewn across the table top is a wide spray of parts, tiny gears and springs and bits to create the rat he’s going to use to test the doors.  He lets himself drift on his fiddling to keep from thinking about what’s going on, but the truth is he’s frightened—MI6 is supposed to be impenetrable, but he’s fast learning it’s not.  M had warned that everyday objects have become immensely dangerous; each time he picks up the soldering iron, he has to wonder if it will be the last.

“Isn’t that a bit small to test the doors?” Bond asks from the door and Q swears, dropping the iron against the blotter on the desk and watching the ugly scar that forms.  He turns it off, carefully setting it aside before casting a baleful glare at Bond.

“It’ll do the trick, should I get it finished.  Something I can help you with, Double-oh-seven?” he asks, pleased that he sounds suitably annoyed and not flustered that Bond is in his office.  It’s a silly crush, and there are so many more important things.

“I’m to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t burn the place down,” Bond offers and Q huffs.  Honestly.  “Per M,” Bond adds, and there go Q’s plans of sending him off; perhaps he can plant the man somewhere with a pile of explosives to keep him amused.

“Not necessary,” Q says.

“According to M,” Bond reinforces with a graceful shrug that makes Q painfully aware of his thin shoulders and gawky frame.

“Why don’t you go bother someone else?  I’ll cover for you and say you’re here,” Q offers, idly sorting through the parts to find the ones he wants.

“Or I can stay here and watch you work,” Bond suggests.

Christ.  Embarrassment floods into his stomach and Q curses the complexion that shows his feelings; his ears go pink and hot as he picks through the gears as nonchalantly as he can.  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“You don’t get a say.”

“Of course I do.”

“M didn’t listen to me, and he won’t listen to you.” 

And that’s a little bit like a punch to the stomach; Bond doesn’t want to protect him any more than he wants to be protected.  Q picks up the soldering iron again, studiously ignoring the way the flush has crawled to his temples now, spilling down his cheeks.  He feels hot, throat sticky with humiliation; Bond stands and watches until Q snaps out, “Sit down, then, and be quiet.”  It takes the iron longer than he wants to reheat, and he stares at his hands while he waits.

“Q—” Bond starts.

“If you’ve got the time, you can fill out your after-mission report,” Q tells him, tone businesslike.  He can’t—if Bond even breathes a word about—his blush spreads and his eyes prickle as he shoves himself deeper into the project.  There’s no way they’re going to talk about it.

Bond is silent for a long moment.  “Okay,” he says finally, though his tone says there’s more.  “I can do that.”

::

Mallory sighs into his cupped hands.  It has only been a few short hours since the first reports—Bond got into the building at eleven, so he knows that whatever has been happening began after that.  Current estimates place the dead and missing near fifty now, but he knows that’s luck—when he checks the CCTV screens, he finds more dark rooms.  Outside, the sun is going down; he can see London through the windows of his office, dark creeping over the city.  He suppresses a shiver.  Soon, the only light in the building will be artificial.  Already around a sixth of it is unnaturally dark; he imagines the windowless rooms in the bowels of MI6 and selfishly resolves to leave his drapes open a while longer.  It is going to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because it wasn't explained in the last chapter notes (though no one particularly seemed to care?) "Babylon-on-Thames" is one of the nicknames of the SIS building in London. Even though this fic takes place in the "new digs" (as Tanner calls them), I've used the name here. And if I use The Office, or Legoland, or The Circus (unlikely on that last one--it's a little bit older and out of date), those are nicknames wiki claims MI6 employees actually use for the place they work. I can't vouch for their veracity, but it's an interesting tidbit!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As before, beta-read by the fantabulous eatingcroutons. Thank you, my dear!

Bond’s not certain; the boy looks exhausted, but he can’t just ask, not after—but there are dark bags under Q’s eyes as he demolishes the little machine he’s been working on for the better part of four hours now.  He’s sent the rest of the branch off to the emergency barracks stowed away deep in the bowels of Q-Branch’s tunnels, but Q himself looks like he hasn’t slept in days.  His fingers are shaking; he’s on the second pot of tea that Bond has seen him make since his watch began.  When he drops the soldering iron and swears, Bond has had enough.  Q places the iron in its stand to contemplate the chunks of melted and fused metals in front of him, and Bond unplugs it, crossing his arms for the inevitable fight.

It doesn’t come.  Q stares at him with bruise-wounded eyes until Bond wants to shake him, make him understand that the building is still shutting down around them, that pouring his heart into this metal creature is not going to save their lives.  More than a third of the building’s gone.  Q’s lip trembles, though, and Bond understands that he knows that; they’ve watched the CCTV screens go dark one by one.  At this rate, MI6 will be lost in less than twenty hours more.

“Sleep,” Bond tells him.

“Fuck you,” Q bites back, so sudden and stinging that it surprises even him.  Q sucks at his lip, wary-shy, and turns back to the shattered metal rat.  “It’s all wrong.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  That design could never climb a door, and it’s the handles that,” he stops.  With a frustrated sigh, Q runs a hand through his hair and turns to Bond.  “I apologize.”

“For what?” Bond asks, surprised.

“Your concern is touching but unnecessary,” Q informs him crisply, tipping up his mug until the cold tea is gone.  He winces,  at the temperature or the tannic taste of old tea Bond can’t be sure.  “That doesn’t mean I can shout obscenities at you for it.”

“When was the last time you slept?” Bond asks bluntly.

“When did the tyres of your outbound flight touch down?” Q asks idly, and no.  No, Bond refuses to believe—

“You must have slept since then, Q.”

“I did.  As soon as you were safely arrived, I handed over the department to R and had a nap,” Q agrees.

“And were back up when I checked in two hours later,” Bond recalls, wincing.

“And then another nap while you were dressing for the opera,” Q continues, though Bond recalls Q helping him orient the cufflinks, so no, it couldn’t have been a full nap.

“And?” Bond prompts, because surely Q’s had more than three hours of sleep in the last two days.

“And then as soon as you made your mark, I showered and kipped on the sofa in my office for twenty minutes before I realized I couldn’t sleep.  Really, Bond, you’re not my mother,” Q scolds, conveniently tripping over the soft question as if it hadn’t happened—and Q had been restless after, but it’s no wonder.  He’s practically squirming now, but Bond wouldn’t be who he is if he favored his interrogation subjects’ comfort over progress.

“You slept for twenty minutes?” he presses.  He expects Q to round on him again, angry and snarling, but Q goes still, fingers curling around the edge of the desk.

“I think that’s enough, Double-oh-seven.  Please leave.”

“And go where?” Bond asks.

“Elsewhere.”  Q’s shoulders quiver tight like a bowstring, unhappiness and exhaustion writ into the line of his spine.  He could force the issue, pry every secret out of Q now and Q would let him; he’s so close to cracking that the predator in Bond’s hindbrain is sitting up, ready to rip and claw it out of him, but.  _“I was thinking, sometime: Bond, would you like to—?”_   The flash of dark eyes and lipstick that had blinked nearly subliminally across his mind’s eye and the answer, the denial he’d barely heard himself give followed by pained silence.  _“I understand.  My apologies.”_

“Q—”

“Just elsewhere, please, Double-oh-seven.  I will leave the shades open and the door unlocked and endeavor to sleep.  Wake me in two hours?” Q asks neutrally, voice even.

“Of course,” Bond says reluctantly and lets himself be shuttled out by Q’s wounded pride.

::

“Perhaps we’re being haunted,” M says over the lip of his glass.  Eve wonders if he’s had too many, but when every moment you see more of the people you’re supposed to be leading drop like flies, it’s hard to place precisely where the line for “too many” stands. 

“By—?” she prompts from her perch on the edge of his desk.  Bill’s in the next room, still obsessively watching the cameras as if his will alone can turn the lights on again, but Eve’s a practical girl.  She pours herself another finger of scotch and sips.

“Take your pick.  Who’ve we managed to kill recently?” M asks, words painfully flippant around a leaden tongue. 

“Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Mallory?” she asks him.  He shrugs.

“Must do, I think.  In this line of work, at least—the thought of there being no sort of afterlife is too bleak after a life spent like ours,” he says.  She hums, considering, but doesn’t think she agrees with him.

“What about heaven?” she asks.

“Do you think we’ve earned it?  After all the things we’ve done?”

“Think on your sins,” she agrees, twirling the glass between her fingers.  The scotch is wonderful, woody and floral with just enough vanilla to temper the bite.  She swallows the rest and smiles.

::

The Q-Branch minions begin to stir after only a few hours’ rest.  They move like zombies, dragging tired, uncaffeinated bodies through the tunnels in slow, halting steps.  Here in the bottom of the building, there’s no natural light to guess the time of day, but R is quite sure it’s still early morning, before five at the latest.  He doesn’t touch the doors; he knows well enough that it’s not safe.  In the main area of the labs, Double-oh-seven is standing like one of those lost dogs waiting for its dead owner to return to a meeting place.  R watches him watch Q through the glass until even he can’t be sure that his boss’s thin chest is moving with breath.

“Is he okay?” R asks softly, sidling nearer the agent.

“Did he sleep at all while I was in Kazakhstan?” Bond asks instead, sounding just as tired as R feels.

“None of us did, really,” R confesses.  Lying on the sofa in his office, Q looks pale and vulnerable, frail and sickly in the fluorescent half-light.

“I’m sorry,” Bond says, but it’s clear he’s not talking about R or the other minions; he’s only got eyes for Q.  It grates on R’s nerves, that—that Bond can upend their lives as part of his job every day and only care about the havoc he’s wreaking when he sees the casualties.

“Tell him that,” R says.

“He won’t let me,” Bond says.

“Might have something to do with you humiliating him over the comm line,” R notes, and Bond winces.  Actually winces, like he cares at all.  “I understand wanting to have the conversation in private, but you said no so fast—”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Bond says sharply.

“Anything said over the comm lines is my business.  It’s Q-Branch’s business; we’re not listening in on your conversations for our health.”

“Don’t spread anything around.  He could get in trouble for that,” Bond warns, and really.  R cocks a brow at that.

“Do you think being written up matters right now?”

And like it’s hitting him for the first time, Bond freezes, turning back to the image of Q framed in bulletproof plate glass.  “No.  I suppose you’re right.”

::

Bill’s fingers clench into fists over the keyboard.  Mallory and Moneypenny are sleeping it off in Mallory’s office; his own beer sits in a warm bottle by his elbow, barely touched, but Bill can’t bring himself to turn in just yet.  There’ll be plenty of time for that soon, anyway.

He’s chief of staff.  He’s met many of the people on the lists as dead or missing; he was directly responsible for hiring most of them.  He remembers them, remembers their stories and their interviews and the quirky facts about themselves that they’d put into their CVs in the hopes of standing out and getting a job at the illustrious MI6.  It’s his fault that they’re dying, at least in some small part of his mind, and so he stands guard over the screens as they black out.  He watches as an entire department—internal resource management, the bean counters in charge of making sure MI6 has the pens and toner cartridges to function on the home front—falls while the agents inside are sleeping; they won’t wake up, and it’s his fault because there’s no way to get them out in time once the lights start to go.  There’s nowhere to put them as the available space in the building is swallowed up in huge gulps by the creature devouring them.

And it’s Bill’s responsibility to take the calls as field agents begin to report in—no, don’t come back.  Go to ground.  It’s not safe here.  You can’t get in, and if you could get in, you wouldn’t be able to get out.  You’ll die if you come home.  Each agent lost, stranded on the other side of the globe, abandoned in Marrakesh or Denver or Sichuan.  He tells them to help themselves because MI6 can’t anymore.  MI6 can’t save itself anymore.  He doesn’t dare try to dial out; he’s seen it tried and watched the current arc through the man’s body like lightning, a jolt so strong and fast that his hand had blistered, melted to the Bakelite handset, bones fused and curled around the warped and scarred plastic.  His knee had been touching the steel desk; his joints had blown out in a shower of flesh and bone and wriggling grey cartilage.  His name had been Tom…Tom?  Bill can’t recall his last name but remembers the story he’d told about his daughter asking if she’d get to meet the Princes if he got the job.  He laughs; there have been a lot of Toms since the quarantine began, even if they hadn’t been named Tom.  They’d all died because Bill had hired them.

His beer is warm and stale, flat enough that it doesn’t burn when he throws back half the bottle in one go.  Bill knows he can’t blame himself.  If he hadn’t hired Tom, it would have been someone else in that role, someone else on that phone.  He can’t take sole credit for the deaths he’s seen, the chaos that’s ripped MI6 to pieces in just a few short hours.  He can stand guard, though.  He can watch through the camera lens.  And he can remember the little details that had made him hire each and every one of them.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features the suicide of an original character and may be triggering. Please read with caution.

Q comes to slowly, still weak with sleep deprivation but no longer hurting in his bones for the chance to close his eyes.  Through some fluke, his office has stayed lit; beyond the wide glass, he sees Bond talking with R while the rest of his department tries to pretend they aren’t staring.  Q gives himself a once-over: clothes rumpled, hair irreparably mussed, face creased with lines from the cushion, but otherwise whole; he leaves the little office and watches Bond’s face drop into careful neutrality.

“You unbelievable prick,” Q tell him.  Bond accepts it without even a hangdog expression, not a word of protest or a sorry eye.  “How dare you?  Two hours.  Isn’t that what I said?”

“Do you feel better?” Bond asks instead of answering.

“That isn’t the point, Bond.”

Bond’s face folds, something like guilt and genuine irritation sweeping across his expression.  His eyes are sharp, burning.  “I rather think it is at this point.”

“You’ve stolen hours that might have been used to save lives, Bond!” Q snaps, and something visibly cracks in Bond’s countenance.

“Why can’t you get it through your thick skull?  There is no cavalry.  There is no deus ex machina, no last minute intervention that will save us.  I let you have six hours.  Would you save the world in four hours, Q?  Are you that arrogant?  In the time you slept, I watched the screens tip over from one half to two thirds black.  More than half the people in this building have disappeared—they’re probably dead.  You think they’d be alive now if you were still melting little bits of metal together?  Burning your fingers and raging to yourself about all the good you could have done?  You’d be angry either way.  At least this way you have the energy for it—”

“And a focus?  You meant well, Bond.  I know that.  But there’s no kindness in stealing something I have so little of left,” Q says.  Bond’s words have left him stinging, a little dizzy, swallowed up with ghosts of poetry.  “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” he recites softly, more to himself, and the crumbling bits of Bond fall further.

“No, Q.  Take gentle.  When it’s offered to you, take it,” Bond murmurs, and Q knows he’s speaking from experience.

“I can’t.”  Q smiles and Bond looks breathlessly sad.

::

He isn’t sure precisely what he was expecting Q to be able to do, but the weak fistful of metal scraps that Q drops on his desk absolutely takes Mallory’s breath away.  Hope that he hadn’t realized he was still holding tightly finally slips from his grasp; he pulls at it, but Q’s shaking sigh ruthlessly pries it from him.  Mallory’s not sure what the device would have achieved, really—more treating the symptom than the cause, if he’s honest with himself—but he can’t keep the disappointment off his face.  Q flinches and he doesn’t bother trying to reassure him.  According to their projected timeline, MI6 will be dark in just under twelve hours. 

“I’m sorry,” Q says, and Mallory watches Eve touch his arm gently.  She’s good at gentle.  Tanner is throwing things in the next room.

Mallory is not going to allow himself the luxury of a response.  He nods briskly, squares his shoulders—keep calm and carry on—and lifts his coffee to see if it will help calm the roaring in his head.  “It was a long shot,” he confesses, and Bond shifts unhappily behind Q.  He’s not being quite fair.  Q’s uncomfortable, and Mallory thinks of the pressure—the horrible, unrelenting pressure each of them has been living under—and knows he can be kind.  Should be kind.  “You’ve done the best you could,” he adds mildly, and Q nods, looking away.

“Gentlemen,” Mallory says finally, pushing away from his desk.  “Lady,” he adds, flicking a glance to Eve.  “Thank you for your service.”

“Are we giving up?” Q asks.  He looks confused, frightened—Christ, he looks so young.  They all do, except perhaps Bond, who’s all sharp edges and crisp corners and bleak acceptance.

“Projections have us at full dark by eight,” Mallory confesses, and the words suck the air from the room.  In the window, London is starting her day, sunlight peering through, though it will be another hour yet before it’s finally high enough to crest the buildings and be seen overhead.  Outside, life is going on as usual; MI6 feels dead already by comparison.  “Our chances of survival grow slimmer by the minute.  At this point, I don’t know that I can force anyone to keep working as if this weren’t happening; release your employees from their positions for me, would you, Quartermaster?”

“Absolutely not.  I’m not going to sit on my arse and wait for the world to end,” Q snaps, and Mallory cheers a bit at that.  He wants—but there’s so little chance now.

“Give them a choice, Q,” Eve says, and Q shakes off her hand to stalk out.  Bond follows with a short nod.  Eve fondles the neck of the bottle of scotch left out the night before, and Tanner finally joins them. 

::

Panic is welling in Alain’s throat.  Q has come back from M’s office, bad news writ across his face like a tattoo.  “I can’t ask you to stay with me,” he’d said, but really, where are they supposed to go?  Alain has nobody in the building, and it’s not like they can leave; what is he to do?  Hide in the canteen until Death comes for him with his leering skull?  R stays; Alain thinks—uncharitably, he knows—that it’s a pity R can’t be promoted for all of the arse-kissing, at least not while Q is alive.  There may be a full minute when R becomes Q—he stops himself, suddenly sad.  For R, for Q, for himself.  For everyone trapped in this building like rats in a sinking ship, scrambling frantically to find the highest ground, the one part that will sink last and give them a few more stolen minutes, another hollow hour.

And he doesn’t want to do that anymore, he realizes.  There are ways—here in Q-Branch, surrounded by experimental weapons, there are ways—and he will take his own time on this.  He slips away as discreetly as he can; it wouldn’t do for him to be followed.  These tunnels are easy to follow, familiar as the back of his hand, and it only takes a moment before he’s there, surrounded by weapons in progress.  He wonders for a moment, but if he chooses carefully, it can look like an accident.  There’s no need to burden anyone, and anyone upset will be gone, themselves, in just a few short hours; Alain is good at calculations—ten hours.  That’s all that’s left, and if they stay in Q-Branch, they’ve even less than that.  The rooms have been falling in order of importance.  Q-Branch has lasted longer than he’d thought, but compared to what’s left—field agents, the Double-oh program, the drivers and Administrators and all the people whose work makes MI6 into MI6—Q-Branch doesn’t fall very high on the list of departments likely to last more than three hours.  And Q will go down with his ship.  That’s the kind of man that he is.

Alain has choices, though.  Most of them are ridiculously overpowered for what he’s looking for.  Some of them are oblique—there’s a laptop abandoned in the corner, still making whirring little cheeps as if it has no idea that it will never finish its work.  There’s also a rack of pistols, Q’s pet project.  Not a one of them will work; each is coded to a specific agent.  There’s a cabinet of biologicals, some of them tagged for weapons and some for defense research; Alain knows he has no chance of getting into the cabinet on his own, so in the end it’s as simple as this has ever been: his belt, looped over the hot water pipe.

He hopes no one is watching.

::

It’s the boy’s choice, but Q’s sobbing is breaking Bond’s heart.  They’d known….  Isolated as they are in Q-Branch, they haven’t seen, but Bond is certain that this is a scene that’s happened elsewhere.  He tries to turn Q from the monitors, but he won’t; Bond doesn’t release Q’s arm until the boy’s twitching stops because he respects this.  The boy deserves to make his own decisions.  Deserved.  Q glares at him through tear-struck eyes and yanks away.

“I’m not leaving him,” Q says, and Bond nods simply.

“I’ll help you.”

Their footsteps echo in the long hall.  The building feels empty, though when they pass the barracks Bond can hear weeping inside.  Q doesn’t flinch, and Bond wonders if something inside of him hasn’t broken, something hopeful.  He lets his hand drop to brush along the back of Q’s and Q lets him, a soft, shaking breath the only acknowledgment. 

It’s quick, quiet work to pull the boy down.  Bond brings him to the center of the room, but Q won’t look at him, inspecting the half-finished projects instead.  The boy’s eyes close under Bond’s careful fingers.  Bond knows he can’t bring this boy back to the room where everyone else is still struggling to live; he’s taken him down from the pipe and that’s all that Q needed. 

“I’m going to put him in one of the other rooms, okay?” he asks Q, and Q nods absently.

He’s dragging the boy down the hall to find an empty room when he notices the silence.  The air is still; the barracks gone cold.  Fear—actual fear—tingles up the back of his spine to lift the fine hairs on his nape, and at the far end of the hall, the lights begin to flicker.  He can’t—for the first time he can remember, he panics, drops the boy where he lies, and darts back toward the room he’s just left.

“Please be—” he gasps desperately, curling his whole palm around the handle.  _Please don’t be dark_ , he begs the universe.  The door swings open.


	5. Chapter 5

The electrical feedback makes the security camera’s image wobble dangerously when the pen hits the door handle; the spark that shoots from it is hot blue.  The pen’s plastic barrel melts to the handle, and R lets out a breath caught so high and tight that it hurts.  Bond’s glaring hard at the door he only barely managed to slip through.  Q looks directly into the camera, but the sound is off; the microphone on this camera is disabled. 

R’s grip is maybe too tight on Elsie’s arm as he drags her over—his own opinion on having the disabled in the workplace aside, perhaps she’ll be good for something for once.  Q’s lips move on the screen as he repeats the words over and over, the same message until he can be sure it’s been caught: “Turn off the cameras, please,” Elsie mumbles, voice thick with disuse and the accent that says she’s forgotten the way these words actually sound.  R releases her with a shove and turns back to the screens, fingers hesitating over the commands before pressing decisively.  The screen goes black all at once.  For what it’s worth, he’s Q now.

::

Q watches the blinking red light stop with the same trepidation as watching a loved one’s heart monitors flatline.  At least the corpse is gone, he thinks hysterically, and the shame hits him a moment later.  Alain, he remembers, not “the corpse”.  Alain, whom he’d killed with a word as surely as if he’d shot him.  His teeth chatter; his limbs feel heavy and numb.  He wonders if this is what shock feels like.

“You were right,” he tells Bond, and he can’t even bring himself to look at the man.  “We are going to die here, trapped like rats.  It was pointless to try to escape.”

“No,” Bond says, and honestly, what? 

“Make up your mind,” he snaps.  Bond’s fingers are thick and hot on the back of his neck, just grazing near his collar.

“I have.”

It’s surprisingly easy to give in to the press of a hand against his ribs, turning him to the insistent slide of a mouth against his own, to the way Bond presses the heat of his body against his in the cold room.  There’s no reason to fight if they’re going to die together in this room; when Bond slides his grip to the edge of Q’s jaw and tips it, Q lets him, eyes fluttering behind his glasses.  He has no idea how long they have left, so he’ll take what he can get in the meantime.

Bond’s kiss is softer than he’s expecting, lips smoother than he’s imagined and less tongue than he’s observed on planned seductions during missions.  He doesn’t realize he’s still shaking until Bond eases his arms around him, tucking him into the hollow of his throat.  “I’m so sorry,” Bond says.

“Don’t,” Q tells him.  Because he really can’t…doesn’t care what Bond is sorry about, doesn’t want to hear Bond’s last words or be his confessor, can’t handle the thought of whispered admissions just before death.  “Just…this.  Instead.”  He steals a kiss; Bond lets him, graciously. 

And oh, Bond’s mouth is everything, everything he’d only been half-convinced he’d wanted.  Bond kisses like it’s the only thing worth his focus, slow and deep then short and nipping, hands everywhere as he pulls himself into an office chair and eases Q onto his lap, legs stretched over his thighs.  Q’s gasping breath is sharp, Bond’s answering laugh breathy and nearly voiceless.  “Christ,” Q mumbles, bucking into the solid weight of him.

“James,” Bond corrects gently, and oh, Bond would be so vain.  Q chuckles and presses harder into him just to hear Bond’s breath catch.

“You’re hard,” Q says.  He knows he sounds silly, lust-drunk and marveling, but oh.  He is.  He is, solid and thick and just right for rubbing against, and he lets his head drop heavily to Bond’s shoulder.

“Of course I am.  You’re gorgeous,” Bond says.  It’s not fair that he sounds this fond; if he were going to live, Q knows he’d be falling for the man.  “Spread,” Bond coaxes instead, sliding hot hands up the length of his thighs to bring him in tighter, and Q does obediently, knees akimbo and Bond’s palm firm and guiding on his arse, closer and closer until they’re grinding hard together, cock to cock through their trousers, and Q is shaking from something other than nerves.

“Bond,” he sighs.

“Are you going to?” Bond asks and Q buries his face in Bond’s shoulder.

“Don’t, please,” he asks, hips jerking against Bond rhythmically now.  “I don’t—”

“You don’t like dirty talk?” Bond asks.  Q resents him for pretending to record the thought for later.

“You don’t have to pretend—”

“And who’s pretending?  Can you feel me just as hard as you?  I like having a lapful of you, seeing you squirm there and try to hold on to that prissy demeanor.  I want to watch you come in your pants on my thigh, Q.  I’d like nothing more,” Bond tells him, voice going dark and smoked and sultry.  And Q is tired of fighting it, lets himself succumb to the crawling heat of it and the ill-defined desire that’s rapidly turning into a picture clear enough for even him to see only now that it’s too late.  He brings his mouth up to lip at Bond’s jaw, his cheek, his ear—anywhere he can reach.

“Will you do it too?” Q asks against the skin at his lips.  Bond’s hand tightens against his arse, clenching at the back of his shirt and holding him close as he presses hard enough to bruise himself against Q’s hipbones.  Q throbs; he hasn’t gotten off like this since he was a teenager, but the bruises Bond is pressing into his spine are delicious.  They won’t have a chance to fade, he realizes, and his cock gives a lurch of interest at that, at carrying Bond’s fingerprints into the dark. 

“Do what?” Bond asks.  The way his arms tighten around Q belie his casual tone; he wants to hear him say it, and who is Q to deny him?

“Come,” he says, dragging his open mouth up until he’s speaking directly into Bond’s ear, his own breath coming back warm and wet after striking Bond’s skin.  “In your pants,” he clarifies softly, “like a boy.  Will you?”

Bond groans, clutching his arse until Q can feel the bruises of his buttons pressed against his skin.  He’s pulled back from Bond’s ear suddenly; the kiss that comes is wet, more licking into his mouth than a proper kiss.  It’s messy, passionate.  Bond grunts, thrusting hard against him, panting, wounded sighs escaping between each rocking motion until Q’s orgasm comes on so fast and so strong that it leaves him seeing double.  He cries like a sparrow when he comes, high and sweet and trilling, and the thrill that dances up his spine when he feels Bond follow is intoxicating. 

He’s wet and sticking in his pants when they’re done, but Bond lets him lie and he tucks his face in, waiting for the end of the world.

::

Q-Branch is offline.  She has no idea when it happened; they’d turned their eyes away for a moment and the department went black.  Eve stares at the screen, something like grief sneaking up behind her to crouch on her shoulders.  Q.  Bond.  They’re gone, she knows, because Q wouldn’t leave his branch behind and Bond wouldn’t leave Q.  It’s devastating, a waste of brilliant men the way each of the deaths caused by this ridiculous situation has been a waste of brilliant men and women, each of them dedicated to their jobs and to England and each of them punished for it.

M is silent when she tells him; Tanner swigs straight from the bottle of scotch and stares.  Eve knows the feeling: if James Bond can die, what chance have the rest of them got?  They’re down to hours now—about seven, she thinks, perhaps six—and they’ve still got no idea what’s going on.  She almost _would_ suspect ghosts, knowing full well how ridiculous an idea that is.  There’ve been no demands.  No one has called asking for a million pounds, no one has offered a solution in exchange for diplomatic power or judicial leniency.  Whatever is happening will happen to them all.  Whoever is causing it will have his dark way. 

The screens are more than three quarters dark now.  All that’s left are the major administrative rooms, the agents’ offices and break room, a handful of necessaries like the toilets and store rooms for things they still need.  There’s thought in how the building is blacking out now; they’re divided into quadrants of survivors, small tribes with vast fields of black between them.  In some cases, hallways are gone with lit rooms less than six feet and still a million miles apart.  The agents inside those rooms cry out to each other on the cameras until the numbness sets in and they slump against electrified doors, careful not to touch the knobs or jambs and wistful for the coworkers near enough to hear but too far to touch.  There are eight electrified doors between M’s office and the nearest agent.  The three of them have taken to following each other around like puppies, each wordlessly terrified of being left alone.

But Eve is beginning to suspect she knows how the last few hours will end.  She knows the order of the rooms, at least: the Double-ohs will go first, because as important as those agents are, they are still more expendable than the two dozen field agents still left in the expansive office warrens.  MI6 could continue without the Double-ohs, she knows, and she’s beginning to catch on to this game, she thinks.  She’s starting to understand, just a bit, after hours of watching the screens with nothing else to do, and she’s starting to think that the person—and she’s certain it’s a single person now, though she can’t place anything more concrete than a gut feeling on that—wasn’t counting on anyone else being able to watch the full map of his plan.  This is why Q-Branch is gone—the ability to see the whole playing field is too strong an advantage to grant someone when you’re counting on their ignorance and isolation—

Eve’s breath catches in her throat.  It’s a hunch.  Barely a thought needling the back of her mind, but.  She turns back to M and Tanner, who are silently watching their last few hours tick by.  “I think—”

And that’s the moment that things go tits up. 


	6. Chapter 6

Her name is Moriah Handler.  That’s the name she was born with; it’s the name she died under eight years ago when she took up her new identity as a field agent for MI6 and started calling herself Trinity Collins.  Moriah Handler is too stubborn to die, though, really—Trinity Collins may have been the top agent in her class, but it’s Moriah who’s going sneaking through the halls now.  In the end, Moriah’s the one that’s real.  No updates in hours on the situation; they saw the hall go black through the enormous plate glass windows until there was only the barest hint of light down the hall from the emergency lamps.  That’s what got this idea in her head—she saw the lamp go out an hour ago, and now she’s seen it come back on.  This dark isn’t permanent; the quarantine on this hall has lifted.

“You don’t have to, Trin,” Avery tells her.  He’s tugging at her holster to make sure it’s in place, though.  Avery’s good backup.

“I do, though.  If the quarantine’s over here, it might be over elsewhere, too.  We might yet make it out of here,” she says.  He understands, she knows.  It’s in his taut nod, in the way he pats her arm and slides his own revolver into her holster since hers has been checked in to the armoury. 

“Take care,” he reminds her.

“Ta, Avery.  I will.”

And then she’s headed into the hall for real, the dark like a blanket over her shoulders.  They’d thrown things at the door handle to make sure it was safe, and she steps over the little heap of staplers and paperclips and pens slumped in the opening.  The weight of the door shuts it behind her, but she gives the other agents inside a thumbs-up to let them know she’s good.  Terrified, but safe.  She tucks the fear behind the mask she’s used for missions these past eight years and inches down the hall toward the safety light.  There’s a storage room there; she’s to make it down the hall, secure the storage room, and bring back the most useful things she can carry.  If there are mops, they’re going to use the rolled metal tubes to test the electrified doors, but otherwise they’ve got no idea what to expect.  They’d drawn straws, but Moriah had volunteered when it had come up John—she’s got no one waiting for her outside, unlike John’s wife and two girls. 

She lobs her keys at the handle once she’s close enough.  They catch and hang with no shower of sparks, and nothing spits when she brushes the metal with the back of her hand tentatively.  Safe.  The door is safe, and when she turns the handle to open it, unlocked.  Her breath catches, but the room is entirely too dark for her to see much farther than a metre into it.  She fumbles into her pocket for her lighter and brings it up, curious.  There’s a broom she can use as a temporary torch if she’s careful; she makes her decision and lights the brush.

The fire alarm system in MI6 operates on electricity.  There’s no chance she’ll set it off with the broom, but she’s not surprised when the sprinkler system inside the storage room goes off, gently dripping onto her head and shoulders as she peers into the dark.  It even takes her a moment to register the first uncomfortable symptoms as she pokes through the cupboard, gathering the mops and anything else that looks useful.  By the time she makes it back to the hallway, the broom torch has gone out under the sprinklers; she’s having difficulty holding breath inside her lungs and her muscles are locking.  She staggers, waves the others away from the door, and vomits down her front, clutching at the tools in her hands.  The seizures hit just as the vapor steaming off her skin starts to creep under the door and Avery begins to shake.

::

She doesn’t recognize the symptoms, but she knows procedure; Eve won’t let herself panic.  There’s only a fraction of a minute before they’re dead, too.  She doesn’t think as she steps away from the computer with brisk, businesslike efficiency, just drops her jacket, her coat, rips curtains from the wall, and douses the mess with the entire reservoir from the cooler.  She’s still working the drenched fabric into the cracks beneath the door when M and Bill begin to realize that something dangerous has finally come; she grabs her laptop and ushers them back into M’s office as if another solid door could protect them.

“Moneypenny?” M asks, but she can’t answer, not yet.  He gives her a moment—she _takes_ a moment—to shake off the quivering adrenalin before answering.

“—not the dark.  It’s not the dark; it was never the dark,” she says, fingers curling against her leg.  She has no idea if the tightness in her lungs is fear or— “It’s the _gas_ that we should fear.”

Mallory looks interested for the first time in a long while.  “Explain.”

She dials the recording back and presses play.

::

It’s the alarm that wakes him—the impossible alarm.  Q pries himself up from Bond’s lap with a wince; certain parts feel matted and tangled and disgusting, though it brings a smirk to his face to see by Bond’s face that he agrees.  It’s the laptop in the corner that’s going.  Something’s set it off.  Q feels almost rested; according to his watch it’s been three hours.  They’ve got four left.

He feels a bit like a character in a science fiction film trailer, limbs treacle-slow and uncooperative as he pushes himself through the stagnant air.  There’s something significant about this alarm.  There’s something significant about the fact that they aren’t dead yet.  They should be dead.  When Bond had shoved his way into the room, the pitch darkness of the hall looming behind him, Q had assumed—now he can barely look at Bond, and it’s more than a little unfair that they’ve survived long enough for him to have time for post-coital awkwardness.  But the alarm—oh, that alarm is unusual, and Q has prided himself in knowing every aspect of the weapons testing laboratory like the back of his hand.

It’s coming from that laptop—that laptop that shouldn’t be there; the project’s wrapped pending ethics debate.  Q remembers the project now, the vague details—something to do with weaponising a system’s own—his breath catches.  The force of his disbelief is tangible, an explosion caught beneath his ribcage that expands like the universe spinning into creation; he can’t believe.  Won’t, can’t not.  The stunning hurt of it clenches and—

His ragged breath emerges as a sob; Bond shakes himself awake in time to see Q gripped by a panic attack in the centre of his own laboratory.  “Q?” Bond asks, voice wary, and Q wants to reassure him, but.

“I can’t,” he manages through his locked throat.  “Please, Bond, tell me there are no men like that?  Not here; there can’t be.”

“Q?” Bond repeats, concern knitting his brow.  Q feels himself swooning and Bond is there, carefully trying to lower him to the floor.

“No,” Q says, pushing away from him.  It’s too much, too much closeness, too much trust.  He can’t handle— “Tell me there are no men who could, that there are no men who would,” he commands desperately.

“Could?”

“Hundreds of people, Bond.  Hundreds of people, and maybe you don’t know them all, maybe you’re not familiar with each of them, but you know enough of them.  You greet them in the hall and take your tea with them; tell me there’s no one who could, not here.  Not after working so hard to protect the people you’re just going to kill.”  His teeth are chattering; the shaking is in his hands now, in his fingers and his knees.  “Please, Bond.”

“I’m not certain I’m following you, Q,” Bond says carefully.  And Q knows he sounds like a madman, knows that a Pollyanna, pie-in-the-sky view of the inherent goodness of people has no place in a place like MI6, but he doesn’t want to believe. 

But the computer’s only half of it, turning MI6’s impressive defensive systems against her own employees.  There’s a large part of the picture missing, the story of what’s happening in the dark to keep agents from walking away from it.  He gathers himself in hands like claws, pulling the shattered edges close enough to keep functioning; the betrayal of it will leave him nauseated if he dwells on it, the idea of someone—his thoughts can’t connect, each nerve firing too hard, too fast, too dizzy for a moment, spinning wild and blurred until he gags, then retches.  Bond’s got the bin in seconds; he loses what little he’s got left of yesterday’s breakfast, thinks on the husk of his egg sandwich for no reason other than apparent masochism, and vomits again.

“Q,” Bond says, voice grounding him as the nausea recedes, fading into the haze where he’s shoving all of his emotions to be considered later.  “Please let me know what’s going on.”

“I’ve found it,” Q says, voice small.  “I know what’s going on, and I may be able to stop it.”

Bond’s breath is like a tyre being punctured: sudden, wheezing with surprise.  “What?”

The hope in his voice makes Q’s stomach hurt, because he hasn’t yet figured it out.  Bond is brilliant, an intelligent man capable of deciphering the intricate details of human motivation and more than passable with machines, but this situation has stripped him—stripped them all—of the concept of ulterior motives, of the idea of such intimate betrayal.  “I just don’t understand why,” he confesses, frowning.

“Hang ‘why’; there’s all the time in the world for that later,” Bond reminds him, but Q shakes his head.  In this case, they need to know—they’ve already accidentally bought themselves more time, only to waste it fucking and taking a nap.  He _needs_ to know why. 

Q knows the login passcodes of all of his employees.  He programs them himself, telling them that they’re generated automatically when he takes care to select each cycling passcode meticulously.  _Alphabet soup_ for this one, a personal joke about the nature of secrecy in MI6’s upper echelons; the last cycle’s passcode had been based on Scrabble.  Letters.  Letters, the basis of identity in the more sensitive positions—M.  Q.  R—


	7. Chapter 7

Dense firewalls surround the program.  Q knew to expect this—it was his idea, after all—and it’s nothing he can’t handle, but the sheer depth of obfuscating code is staggering at first.  Bond stares over his shoulder.  He still hasn’t spit out the horrifying truth: Q’s own second in command, R…even as he thinks it, a feeling like a bruise pulls itself up between his lungs.  He scrubs a fist into the well of his eye, pulling off his glasses to dig until stars spark in his vision and the dull ache throbs in time with the sharper pain of betrayal.

“This is someone you know,” Bond says, and Q knows he’s guiding, coaxing, trying to ease the truth from him in a way that won’t set off another devastating panic attack.  And Q understands, appreciates Bond’s pull at subtlety, but resents the kid gloves, resents the way he’s good enough for a last-minute fuck but suddenly too unstable to talk to like he’s not a fucking child.

“It’s R,” he says, words bitten and jagged.  “This is a project from Research and Development, some months from being completed—or so I was told—though obviously not.”

“R?” Bond asks, and in any other setting the low growl of his voice would be sensual—Q stops to press the pads of his fingers into his closed eyes.  Now is not the time to think with your cock, he berates himself, and a hysterical giggle bubbles behind his lips, but Bond is already treating him like he’s unwell.  There’s no sense in confirming the poor opinion.

“It’s a cracking cruel idea, really.  Incredibly unethical: herd the enemy like cattle until you’ve eliminated the chaff and concentrated the best in one central location.  It’s torture—brilliant, blindingly brilliant psychological torture, testing people like lab rats until they accept that there’s no recourse, that you have a power over them that can’t be fought.  Strip them down until there’s nothing worth rebuilding.  We shelved it last week for the ethics committee proposal.  I had no idea how evil it was.”  It strikes him then, his part in this, and he turns to Bond, eyes wide and shattered.  “It is.  It’s absolute evil.”

Bond reaches for him then, tucking him carefully along his frame.  Q’s shaking; he has no idea when that started again, but his eyes feel stuck open.  He tries to force himself to sink into the hot salt smell of Bond’s throat and can’t, can’t relax into Bond’s stilted hand on his shoulder blades.  “It’s not your fault,” Bond says, and Q knows better.

“Don’t patronise me, Bond,” he says, but there’s no sting to the words.  There’s no heat, no anger; it’s practically a plea.  “If you think R holds any power of his own—”  But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  Probably at least part of it.  Q understands helplessness now, better than he ever has before.  “I don’t know how I didn’t recognize it the moment it started.”

Bond is silent, thinking, and when he opens his mouth it’s slow.  “We’re meant to be dead by now.”

“I’m reasonably certain of that, yes.”

“But that boy—,” Bond says carefully.  Q cuts him off with an impatient hand, pulling away to regard the computer again.

“Yes.  We owe Alain a tremendous debt,” he says, even as he sinks into the code.  It’s thick, treacly work that repairs itself the instant he makes a tentative poke at it, but he can feel his panic fading as he finally, finally has something he can do.

::

Eve’s breath is shallow, burning in her lungs from lack of air, but the minutes pass and they’re fine.  They’re _fine_.  Bill’s hands are shaking; on impulse, she presses her lips to the center of his knuckles as M dials the security footage back and they watch the entire thing again.  

“Trinity Collins,” she supplies as the figure on the screen is doused with a substance and begins to stagger away.  Neurological symptoms present quickly, and the agent is down in minutes after the full soaking she’d received.

“Moriah,” Bill corrects gently, and Eve knows suddenly that he knows her name, too; she catches his eye and he smiles, mouthing a word she hasn’t heard directed at her since her days in uni.  Her blush catches her off guard.  He turns back to the screen and they watch Moriah seize on the floor again.  Again, the penny drops and the agents beyond the glass scatter, gas masks appearing before Moriah’s body is brought into the room beyond.  They were watching through the window.  They know about the fire systems.

Eve would panic about that if she could—after everything that’s happened, she’d trusted that at least the sprinklers would respond in the event of a fire, but now she can’t help the instinctual shiver when she sees the little device set in the ceiling.  They’re everywhere, and it must be the roof reservoir that’s tainted.  She spins through the training she’s received, the searing memory of mustard gas and the way the tear gas had induced vomiting that was worse than the gas itself.  There’s something familiar—she can’t place the symptoms of this one, but it’s something she’s seen before.  She doesn’t trust the hall, and once the mess she’s piled against the door dries—

The phone catches her out.  She’s got her hand on it before the first ring is over, but it hits her—she turns to Mallory, heart in her throat.  He presses the speaker button with a slow hand and nods.  This could be it.

“Hello?” the voice on the other end of the line asks.  “I’m surprised you answered.”

::

It’s an important part of their training as agents: young, impressionable trainees are led into a gas chamber and gassed until they plead for mercy.  There’s a point to it: it’s not like MI6 is needlessly cruel.  They’re sent in with masks to learn the importance of getting your gas mask on right the first time—though in real field work it’s not something that’s benefitted much; you’re as like to barely be able to manage slinging your collar over your nose when the situation actually hits.  Even so, the heavy hit of a mask against his ribs rockets Avery into action.  The mask is on his face before he’s fully registered what it is, hands moving on autopilot as he clears it, rubs the rubber seal with certain fingertips, and tugs the straps into place.  Trin is on the other side of the glass without one—Trin.

It’s a queer feeling, a little like a sharp knife has begun slowly rusting to his ribs.  She’s alive.  She’s alive, breathing shallowly on the floor.  She’s going to die and there’s nothing he can do about it.

MI6 doesn’t encourage attachments.  There’s nothing appropriate about forming a friendship with someone you may need to leave behind someday, but that really says fuck all about life in the field, doesn’t it?  Avery and Trin have been on assignment together a dozen times over the years, have spent a hundred nights out together at the local, and on one notable occasion woken up from a night of blackout drinking apparently still mid-coitus—they’d finished because Avery has issues with leaving a job undone, then resolved never to even think about it again.  For the most part he’s been successful, at least outside of flashes of memory of Trin’s perfect breasts, flashes not entirely unlike a teenage boy’s hazy and unwilling recollections of his sister in a towel.  They aren’t together—they’re something more.  She’s lying in the floor barely breathing.  His lungs burn.

“We’re going out there,” he says, pressing his hand to the glass.

“It’s not safe,” from Wills.  Avery tries to keep his glance from scathing.

“Whatever’s out there could be here just the same.  The hall is clear; I’m not staying here.  You can if you like,” he says reasonably.  He takes a deep breath behind his mask and opens the door.

::

It’s not his nature to sit still.  Bond’s never been a man to wait; it rankles, leaves him pacing the room.  There’s nowhere to go.  There’s nothing he can do.  Q types.

The room is full of half-finished prototypes, and he would feel a kid in a candy store except.  His mind is skipping, spinning in circles and tracking the same path over and over, each time coming to the same abrupt stop.  _This is our own fault_.  His thoughts hit the wall of it, too massive and powerful to overcome, and twirl dizzy back to the start: they’re trapped in a maze of Q’s own making, locked into the building efficiently, effectively.  MI6 is shattered—would MI6 have cared if this were happening somewhere else?  If this were being used as a tool against her enemies?  _This is our own fault_.  He worries at the edge of it, pries and tries to move around it but it won’t budge.

He’s done horrible things.  He has no right to judge; he’s left a man in the desert with nothing but a can of motor oil and slept like a baby when that man was found dead.  He’s killed with impunity.  It’s never bothered him before, but.  Well, that was never at MI6, was it?  Never someone who didn’t deserve it for one reason or another, never for any reason aside from the protection of Queen and Country and a tiny helping of revenge, but always up close.  Always dirty, messy, personal.  This is boys playing war games, computer games, brutally and efficiently hurting people from miles away with a cup of tea at their elbows.  Q doesn’t look at him, and he’s glad of it.


	8. Chapter 8

He’s halfway down the hall, mop in hand like some kind of Sunday warrior fighting the dust bunnies, when the lights flicker dangerously.  Avery’s suddenly sure he’s made a gross miscalculation; behind him, Wills and Terrance stall, all three of them huddled at 2-6-10, backs in in a tight, familiar formation.  There’s a low, singing rumble and then—

“It’s the jenny,” Wills says, voice hushed and reverent.  “Good God.  It’s the jenny.”

And it is.  Avery can hear the rumble as it becomes a hum, the generator gathering power and the soft buzzing of lights as the building begins to fade in again.  There’s a moment—one sweet, brilliant moment—where the hall is normal: starkly lit from end to end, unoccupied but otherwise unscathed by the terror.  Then the lights do something odd: they glow. 

Unlike the fading, which had been a slow and dull fear, something about the way the lights brighten, more and more vivid until the three of them are wincing and covering their eyes, something about that light feels worse.  It’s more unexpectedly threatening; he’s never had a reason to fear the light before, but as the lamps begin to spark white heat in their casings, it’s a guttural panic that grips Avery.  It’s instinct that he gets his arm up over his face, over his closed eyelids, as the air fills with sharp cracking and the soft ringing of falling glass. 

He drops his arm from his face, swimming through the dots in his vision, and grabs for Wills and Terrence.  Even the safety lights are gone; they are surrounded in inky black again.

::

“What are your demands?” Mallory repeats into the phone.  On the other end, the response is as expected: the voice-altered villain might as well be twirling his moustache to go along with the throaty, wicked laugh he gives at M’s question.

“That’s not the point of this exercise, M.”  The voice says the name like a punchline, the end of a long joke that no one understands.  “What did you think was going to happen—”

The lights flicker.  “You bastard,” Eve shouts, and Mallory can’t even bring himself to scold her.  She’s exhausted, dark circles under her eyes and hands clenched into tight fists.  They all are; part of him is grateful for the deadline because another day of this would kill him.  “You complete and utter—”

“Ah,” the voice tuts over the phone’s speakers, and suddenly Mallory can’t stand it anymore.  Pacing helps, calms his nerves as he forces himself on a short circuit of the room to burn out the excess energy.  He can’t—he may not be a field agent, may not be the sort of person who goes out and places himself in needless danger anymore, but _life_ is crawling under his skin poison-sweet and burning so close to death.  If he doesn’t move, he’s going to sizzle into ashes.

“Surely you have demands.  You must have demands.  You’re not a stupid,” he guesses, “—man?”  The voice gives nothing away, smug silence greeting him.  As if I’d tell you so easily, that silence says.  As if you’d figure it out when smarter men than you have failed and died.  More experienced agents than you have failed and died.  As if I’d give the answers to a stuffed-shirt politician who has, within the first year of his tenure as head of MI6, presided over the single most catastrophic loss of life within the agency since its inception.  He punches a lamp and Eve flinches; regret bites at him in huge mouthfuls, swallowing him up.  The bulb has shattered, shards of glass on the floor rug.  “You have to have demands.  You have to have a reason for doing this.”

“I am amused by it,” the voice says, and really, that’s quite enough of that.  He waves at Tanner to disconnect the call and Tanner looks surprised.

“Are you—?” Tanner starts and he waves again.  There’s no point in this.  There’s no point in listening to the deranged ramblings of a madman when, loath as he is to admit it, that madman holds all of the power.  They are down to the last shining bastions against the dark, perhaps three lit rooms in a sea of night; the sun has come down and they’re beginning the last, long night.  Either this man will kill them or not, and it surprises Mallory just how little he cares about why.  He wants—

The voice on the other end is chuckling, ugly, smug.  There’s no way around the fact that he’s won and they all know it.  Tanner picks up the phone to disconnect when the lights begin to fluctuate again, the hall beyond the door filling with yellow light.  Eve’s computer screen lights up as rooms that were once black and silent begin to reveal themselves again, dim grey creeping into twilight and steadily lifting.  There are so many corpses.  So many still, unmoving bodies, the signs of something terrible having happened in the dark; like the agent lying sick and dying down the hall, there are rooms of people who have died painfully, seizing in the dark and too paralyzed to scream.  And yet….

He can see them moving.  Not all of them; holding a finger up to Tanner to keep him from disconnecting just yet, Mallory leans close to the screen.  It’s faint—it may yet be wishful thinking, but.  But a head pops up over the edge of a desk in the archive room.  There’s another in the artillery room, agents moving slowly into the light as if they don’t believe in it anymore.  It’s places where there’s no sprinkler system, Mallory realises with a rush.  It’s places where there are things too sensitive to be doused with water, the areas of MI6 that function on vacuums for fire safety.  There are people who have made it, by sheer dint of being in the right place at the right time; skimming the building’s architecture in his mind, Mallory estimates that as many as a quarter of the agents in the building may still be alive and undosed, more if they’ve been moving into safe areas as the rest of the building shut down.  He lets out a soft, whooping laugh, grinning wide until he realises: there are still black rooms. 

Just the two.  Not even a whole department, no—just…just.  They’re Q-Branch rooms.  It takes him a moment to place which ones are still dark: the research lab and the server room.  The Q-Branch technicians are clustered like frightened birds in the center of the main lab, but even through the crowd he can recognise that certain faces are missing.  They’re alone without leaders—both Q and R are gone. 

“Moneypenny,” Mallory calls sharply, beckoning her over with a hand, but before she’s crossed the room he realises something’s wrong.  “Tanner,” he calls, carefully shifting them from the electronic items.  On the other end of the phone line, the laughter has died; their torturer seems confused, just for a moment, and it gives Mallory a wild streak of hope, even as the power surges.  They tuck their heads down together to avoid the flying glass, but he can’t stop the grin on his face and the startled laughter as that voice on the phone mutters, “ _Fuck_ ”and the air is filled with a dial tone.

::

“Fetch me my torch, will you, Bond?” Q asks absently, waving in the general direction of the cabinet.  By his calculation, he has—ah.  The readings on the computer spike and the alarm begins to wail.  He spares a thought for all of the ungrounded electronics across the building, but the idea is shoved aside as Bond returns, torch extended.  He’s got one for himself, too—clever man.  Q’s cracked it; he can be forgiven a little bit of inappropriate glee, unable to force away the wild smile that’s forming on his face.

“What?” Bond asks, but Q doesn’t know what he’s trying to say.  The grin on his face falls—Bond looks wary, closed and uncertain. 

“What’s the matter?” Q asks, because.  Well.  Something is, obviously; Bond’s eyes slide sideways from him where they’d lingered only an hour before.  The fingerprints on his skin throb; for the first time he realises there’s a very real chance he’ll survive to see them fade.  “Bond, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Bond says, and Q would pursue, but the lights are already quickening, becoming uncomfortably bright.  “What’s—?  Did you—?”

“I did,” Q tells him, and in the moment before he ducks his head under the fold of his arms he could swear it’s not praise on James Bond’s face but disgust.  Bond’s arms cover him, though, as he tucks his face in beside Q’s, and he can feel Bond’s breath on his skin in a way that still makes him shiver.  The press of Bond’s hands feels strangely intimate compared to before; he can’t quite call it an embrace, but it feels like one.  Bond holds himself stiff and separate, but Q sinks into his side and Bond shifts, curling an elbow around to protect the back of his neck.

They don’t wait long.  The lights begin to pop, most of the glass caught in the safety fencing around the bulbs, but Q can feel the soft licks of fire where the hot glass strikes his back before falling away.  It’s not enough to burn, not enough to cut, but he nestles his face deeper into Bond’s and waits as the lights explode around them until the room is still and silent.  Q pulls away first, before Bond has a chance to make things awkward—he’s beginning to realise that the potential for survival may be putting Bond off their end-of-the-world coupling, and he resolves not to be _that_ needy fool trailing around behind Bond for scraps of affection.  He squares his shoulders and turns on the torch, bathing the room in an eerie, pale light wherever his beam lands. 

“What did you do?” Bond asks, and when Q turns back, shining the torch’s beam just low enough that he can catch Bond’s face in the edge of its halo, the bewildered anger on it makes his breath catch.  Bond’s not half as pleased as he ought to be, not even a quarter as happy as Q is to know he’s not going to die in the dark today.  “Q, what the hell did you do?”

“I cracked it,” Q says simply, wrapping both hands around the hurt and shoving it down until it’s barely a stomach ache, niggling and present but ignorable for now.  “R’s code.  I cracked it.  We’re going to live.”


	9. Chapter 9

It’s shit.  It’s complete and utter shit, what all of his plans have turned into.  He’d had a chance, had the opportunity to—but.  He can’t even argue.  M may not know—it didn’t sound like he did—but there’s no chance now that Q…Q.  Just thinking about Q fills him with a blinding, seething rage that even he is self-aware enough to call jealousy.  Q is smart enough to know by now—Q is clever.  The lights bursting like overripe fruit are proof enough that Q knows.  He puts the thought aside for the time being.

There are only a few ways this can end now. 

::

Q’s grin is manic; his moods have been shifting wildly for the past several minutes, and Bond can’t help being put off by the expression on his face.  It doesn’t help as Q draws closer and pulls away—he remembers the feeling of Q’s body pressed to his and fights the urge to coax him in, then remembers with horror the casual way Q had confessed to being the cause of this disaster and revulsion clings to his skin in sticking waves.  And yet.

And yet the way Q is lighting up as he sees the chance at life unfolding before him is helplessly charming.  There’s an elastic band between them giving him the illusion of distance, but the farther away he pulls, the stronger the draw back.  Q victorious is dazzling even in the light of a pair of torches; Bond realises it’s been too long past the time for congratulations for a while now.  Q turns away, collecting the other torches from the cabinet and stashing them in a laptop bag that bulges lumpily with its awkward cargo.

“We need to find him,” Q says, and Bond remembers all at once that this is a man Q has considered a friend, a trusted coworker, his second on the field of war.  “Bond, we need to find him.  _I_ need to find him.  I don’t—”

“And what if he doesn’t want to answer your questions, Q?” Bond asks, voice level.  It’s a genuine concern; they’ve each of them taken the anti-interrogation courses.  A position of leadership requires even more than the average MI6 agent—any agent with the potential to know something worth spilling is taught the best way to avoid that spillage, even if it means his own death—and there’s a chance that R won’t tell them anything.  He wonders for a moment if Q has any idea, some secret observation that might lead them to the why of this terrible betrayal, but Q was so wide-eyed and stunned by the hurt of it that Bond thinks maybe not.

“I don’t have any questions for him,” Q says instead, dutifully packing the bag with anything that looks like it may be useful.  Bond sees explosives going in, bits of rope and bobbles that Bond honestly doubts would ever be useful, much less in this situation.  If it comforts Q to be over-armed, though….  He glances aside at the rack of handguns and considers picking one up, if only for the comforting weight of it.  It wouldn’t work in his hands; he reads the names attached to each shelf and considers.  “Nixon, Taylor,” Q says from where he’s apparently debating the merits of a collapsible baton.

“Hm?” Bond asks, blinking.

“Nixon’s gun.  If you’re looking for one that will work for you, that’s the one that’ll work for you.”

“I thought these were biometrically coded to only one agent?”

“And you thought this department had the kind of funds that we could continue creating frivolous toys like exploding pens, too,” Q says, cheeky color coming back to his voice.  They could almost be leaning against Q’s desk again, before this all began, before awkward questions and feelings got in the way.  Q’s dimples are charming; Bond grins in response and watches Q’s smile fade.  “They’re coded to three people each: two field agents and the Q-Branch tech responsible for testing and calibrating that gun.  You aren’t ever meant to find out about that, in the event that you should find yourself opposed to that agent.  It’s odd—” Q breaks off, turning back to his bag with a silent shake of his shoulders.

“What is?”

“We’d planned for all forms of betrayal but the one that happened,” Q says, and he sounds so small.  Bond wants to say something—anything—that will reach across the gulf between them, but he curls his fingers against his thigh and bites the words back.  Meaningless platitudes, and he isn’t even certain what he’d say.  Q doesn’t notice.

“Do you want one?” Bond asks instead.  Q makes a soft sound of inquiry, cocking his head as if he isn’t facing fully away; his body language is a mess of conflicting signals, and Bond can tell this is the safest tack to pursue.  “A gun,” he clarifies.

“I—no, thank…that is—do you think I should?” Q asks.  He turns just his head; his cheek looks full and wan at the same time in the torch’s half-light.  He looks so painfully young.

“Yes.”

“Then I will.  I don’t have a holster,” Q admits, digging through a drawer.  “Not one of my own; I’ve never needed one.”   Bond watches him struggle with the straps and buckles for minute before chuckling low.

“Come here.  Let me help you.”

It’s familiar, helping a junior agent into his holster.  The way the narrow leather bands stretch across Q’s back as he tightens the straps is aesthetically pleasing; his fingertips linger along the line of it, gently easing the shirt beneath to lie flat.  Q’s skin is hot beneath the thin cotton of his shirt, and he only becomes aware in phases that he is tracing idle whorls across that surprisingly broad expanse when Q shifts, sighing, into his touch.  He can’t—even Bond is aware that if he jerks away now it will result in hurt feelings, so he eases back slowly, fingers tripping over the straps until he’s sure they’re snug and seated securely.  “Better?”  His voice is darker than he expected, and Q shivers, stepping away with a downward glance.

“Yes, thank you.”

Bond watches as Q searches through the guns carefully, apparently looking for a specific one.  He settles on an M9: simple, basic, classic.  Bond approves.  Q tests the grip and all three of the lights go green; satisfied, he tucks the gun away in the holster with the air of someone handling a particularly deadly snake he hopes not to deal with again. 

“Well,” Q says, hefting the laptop bag with its load of torches and dangerous weapons.  “Shall we play murder in the dark?”

::

The absolute dark is uneasy; Avery shifts, Wills and Terrance rotating with him like a three-faced Janus as they survey what they can see.  They’re not far from the staff room where Trin lays sick in the dark.  They could make it back, grab torches.  Avery remembers the sight of Trin being doused by the toxin, whatever it is, because of the fire she’d lit; an electric torch is the best decision.  The only decision.

But the handles might be electrified again, he knows.  Hefting the mop in his hands, he carefully breaks away from the periaktos, leaving Wills and Terrance two-sided again.  “I’m going to go get torches,” he offers, pushing off into the dark before he has a chance to stay frozen with fear.  The sound of the mop handle tapping along the hall is loud, but it’s better safe than sorry; he only stumbles once when his outstretched fingertips touch the doorjamb and he jerks back, overbalancing.  He pokes with the mop—it feels safe.

The only sound in the room when the door creaks open is the pained wheeze of Trin’s breath.  He knows where he left her in the dim light of the emergency lamps; here alone in the dark, she must be terrified.  The air underneath his gas mask is heavy, moist with breath, and stale.  He wants to take it off but he doesn’t dare.

It’s not a conscious decision to go to her, not really.  The torches are on the other side of the room, but her breathing sounds wet and ragged, bubbling in a way that makes him ache.  They’ve been partners for so long that he doesn’t know what he’ll do if—when—she dies.  He’s on his knees beside her before he recognises that he’s turned from his original destination.

“Trin.”  The mask muffles her name, but he swears he can hear her breath pick up.  He shouldn’t touch, he knows—this toxin is contact-borne—but he can’t not; taking her hand in his own, he presses it to the outside of his mask.  Her muscles feel stiff, probably pained.  She struggles for breath around locking lungs.  “I’ve got to go, but I’ll come back for you.  Be strong.”  Her fingers curl against his face and he knows she understands.  He also knows he’ll never see her again.

He doesn’t want to look at her once he’s got the torches in hand.  He can’t leave her like this, can’t let her die alone in the dark.  Making a decision, he looks hard at the torches and turns one on, carefully placing it so that she will be bathed in light.  Her face is a rictus of pain, but she tries to smile and it’s worse, worse than anything.  “I love you,” he tells her then and knows it’s true.  “I have to go.”  And that’s true, too.


	10. Chapter 10

For a solid minute, she’s got no idea what’s happened.  The power’s out, completely this time.  Even the phone’s dial tone is gone.  MI6 is still, so still and silent that it sets Eve’s teeth on edge, and it’s only now that she recognises the constant drone of electricity that used to fill the space.  Outside the window, she can hear London faint and busy; it’s a calculated risk when she presses her palm flat on the glass and peers out at the world below.  A hen party staggers by, cackling drunk.  The sweat from her palm squeaks on the glass.  Nothing happens.

“I think,” she manages, just barely, around the lump of tears forming in her throat, “I think we’re safe.”

Eve puts her hand on the window latch and twists.  For the first time in what feels like forever, the room fills with fresh, brisk air.  She sobs.

::

Bond moves like a cat, Q decides: graceful and sleek, a creature half-knit of shadows.  He’s beautiful to watch, all sharp attention and focus; he hugs the walls a few steps in front of Q, just outside the lemon circle of Q’s torchlight, slipping in and out of the dark like fish leaping on a moonlit lake.  He’s nearly silent as he moves.  Q feels clumsy by comparison, shoes squeaking down the hall.  His eyes are glued to the spots of bright sweeping across the hall when—he jerks suddenly, shoulders slamming to the wall.

“What?  What is it?” Bond asks, and it’s pettily comforting that he’s so attentive.  Q lets his torch skim the floor again and reveal—“Oh.”

“Oh?” Q repeats.  He hates the waver in his voice.  “Oh?  I—that’s all you have to say?  Oh?”

“What am I supposed to say, Q?” Bond asks impatiently.  Q’s hand shakes and the light shivers on the floor.  Alain—

“You left him in the hall.”

“And where ought I have put him, Q?” Bond demands, and no.  Neither of them should be this angry—neither of them _is_ this angry; it’s tension hot and tight between them, it’s this dark thing that’s gotten down and nestled in the space they’re pretending isn’t there, this space like a cavity rotting between them—but they’re suddenly snapping, stressed to breaking by everything around them.  “Where was I supposed to tuck him once I removed him from your presence so that you wouldn’t have to face him again?”

“Don’t play it like that, Bond!” Q bites back.  He shouldn’t…shouldn’t escalate, shouldn’t feed this heat, but his nerves are frayed.  “Don’t make it out to be my fault you left him in the hall like a sack of rubbish!”

“You couldn’t deal with a corpse in the same room as you, so you sent me out with it like a sack of rubbish!” Bond snarls. 

“Well, aren’t you lucky that I did!”  The accusation stings, though, and he can’t find the words to fight against it.  Alain was a person, and the body on the floor already stiff and discolouring, that’s not.  It’s not Alain; it’s not a person.  It wasn’t something he could handle.  It’s still not.  His breath comes faster but he can’t avert his eyes—there’s nowhere to look that isn’t Bond or Alain.  He’s teetering at the edge of another panic attack.

“You’d take the credit for that?” Bond asks, incredulous.

_Shut up_ , Q thinks.  _Shut up, shut up_.  Bond doesn’t.

“You’d take the credit for saving our lives because you lucked into finding the only room we could have survived in,” Bond continues, eyes sparking now.  “You didn’t even find it yourself.  He did.”

“I—that’s not—!”

“And when I was the one who came back to make sure you weren’t dead when the lights were going out, you’d take the credit for both of us being in the right place at the right time?”

Bond’s right.  Shame drags its net through him, sweeping everything aside but the prickling remorse and mortification.  “—right,” Q croaks, squinting against the sight of his technician dead on the floor.  “You’re right.  I’m sorry.”

It leaves Bond visibly wrong-footed, off-kilter that the fight should end so abruptly, and he can feel Bond’s suspicious eyes on his shaking limbs, knows he knows him as pathetic.  “Q—”

“Let’s just,” Q starts, cutting him off before James Bond can let his infamous protective streak take over.  He doesn’t want pity, and he doesn’t want Bond to lie to him about how much of this is his fault.  “Let’s just find R.”

Bond is silent.  He nods.

::

It takes him a moment to realise exactly what the cool air on his skin means.  Bill’s not slow, not by any means—he wouldn’t be who he is, where he is if he were—but it takes a moment for his thoughts to gel, for his mind to fully grasp what’s going on.  Eve’s standing at the window, her dark hair lifted by the air as it rushes in to fill the stale office.  Mallory looks as stunned as he feels, like the whole world has been knocked off its axis.

Bill fumbles through the desk for a pen and paper.  “Where were the survivors?” he asks.  Mallory looks at him as if he doesn’t understand English for a moment; the penny drops for Eve a bit quicker, but she’s already shaking her head.

“Bill—”

“I want—”

“It’s not safe,” she’s saying, even as he starts scribbling the departments he remembers down on the paper.  Hall of Records, yes, there’d been movement there.  Armoury.

“I can’t remember them all by myself,” Bill admits.  “There were too many rooms to see at once; where were they?”

“The archive,” Mallory suggests, voice strained and tender, and the wave of affection that sweeps over him is almost overwhelming.  Bill gives him a grateful look and Eve huffs in irritation.

“Don’t encourage him!” she snaps, then turns to Bill.  “Bill.  You can’t—the gas—”

But that’s why he has to—can’t she see that?  Mallory understands.  He knows Eve does, too; they can’t wait for emergency help to come.  He sits there, Mallory at his elbow, and plans.

::

He’s hurt Q’s feelings.  Anyone with eyes would see it in the delicate, wounded way he’s picking his way down the hall, shoulders tight and high around his ears.  And Q has this habit, he’s noticed, of pushing hard only to retreat the moment things don’t go his way, pulling back into dark mutters and embarrassed silence.  Q has a right to be embarrassed, has a right to feel any way he likes, really, but Bond is beginning to resent this passive-aggressive forwardness, this dance of approach and retreat that happens every time he lets himself relax around Q.  It’s not really Q’s fault—attraction eats at Bond like acid, no less damaging for its slow, insidious burn, a feeling like a splinter caught in the back of his mind festering half-forgotten….  Except he’s never really forgotten, has he?  And that’s the problem.  He remembers too well.

He remembers too well a thin, shaking frame wracked with sobs at the terror of seeing a corpse for the first time.  He remembers dark curls plastered to pale skin as he’d held thin, trembling limbs against his own.  Even the eyes, blue instead of green but the same pale, nearly colorless with shock, anger, fear, desperation.  How little he’d understood then.  How little he feels he understands now.  She’d looked at him and seen a killer, and it had been easy to comfort her because she wasn’t one.  Saboteur and thief and liar— _the bitch is dead_ —but not a killer, and the judgment in her eyes had gutted him.  He’d cleaned her hands for her of the invisible taint of blood because he was a killer and didn’t have the right to be squeamish, and now Q is asking for the same absolution, but this may be more blood than he can stomach, and all of it too real.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it?  Right there is the issue they’d taunted each other over the moment they’d first met: Q’s capability.  Perhaps not even his capability—if this exercise has taught him nothing, it’s to avoid underestimating his Quartermaster’s ruthless brutality—but his culpability; one corpse has Q shaking and raging.  What about the hundreds of others that are his fault, too?  Does Q have the right to reach across the world with digital fingers and snuff a life before tea?  Death is intimate—dirty, sticky, stinking, bloody—and Bond remembers his first almost better than he remembers losing his virginity: the way the informant struggled and fought, the tinkling sound of shattered glass and the raspy crunch of powdered porcelain underfoot.  Who was Q’s first kill?  Does he even know?

It’s easy, terribly easy, to kill without seeing the results firsthand.  And perhaps it may take a special kind of detachment verging on sociopathy to ignore the instinctive uneasiness that comes with dealing with the dead, and perhaps an uncomfortable level to be able to accept the knowledge that it’s your own fault for the death.  Bond is aware that he’s not the best portrait of mental health.  But is it better to be uneasy with the corpses and fine with the killing?  Does it make Q more human to tiptoe around the body in the hall as if it might touch him when it’s Q’s own work that caused it to be there in the first place?  For the first time Bond is glad he knows the visceral feel of a throat in his hands, knows the kick of a gun and the reek of singed flesh that comes with a gunshot wound at close range.  He knows the pain and blood and agony of an ended life, and it means more to him than a blip on a screen.  Q has stopped where they passed Allain on the floor, lingering lost in thought; Bond pushes by and walks on.  If he doesn’t, he’ll say something they’ll both regret.

He hears the techs before the light from the torch hits them; they’re quiet, shaken breath and shuffling feet, huddled in a cluster in the middle of the main lab and surrounded by glass and dimly reflective LCD screens.  Q’s light comes up behind him and a wordless cry makes the rounds, aborted and hushed as if the techs have only just realized that they are in a library, their faces a sea of dark shapes interspersed with shining glass lenses and glinting buttons.  There is a constellation of glow tape marking the edges of the desks around them; they unerringly surge past him to embrace their leader.

Bond can only make out a fraction of the enthusiastic murmuring that slowly swells into a raucous roar: “—thought you were dead—” “—watched the screen—” “—did you know?” “Did you know?” “Did you know?”

“We need to get everyone out of here,” Q says instead, face white and bloodless in the thin light of the torches.  “Get the emergency flares, torches, candles—anything you can find.  We need to evacuate the building.”

“Did you know?” one of the techs asks, wondering and scared, and Bond watches Q freeze, then shake his head, then slowly crumple in on himself until every pound of weight that’s been on his shoulders these interminably long hours shows on his face.

“No.  No.  I had no idea.”

Q-Branch curls protectively around their leader, and Bond turns away.

::

The power seems completely dead.  Avery tests each door to be sure, but with each door the checks become less thorough, less important and more brusque: tap twice with the handle of the mop before shoving through.  They move quickly through the floor, clearing rooms as they can.  There are bodies.  Lots of bodies. 

Not every room is empty, though—the first time a head peers over the edge of a cubicle in the pitch black, Avery gets a violent chill that leaves him sucking deep breaths through his mask.  There are only three survivors in the room, and if there’s anyone else they don’t move.  Wills coaxes them into a cluster and brings up the rear behind them, baton ready as he takes the end of the line.  As they move through the hall, they pick up more; before Avery’s really sure where they’re all coming from, they’re a dozen strong, most of them junior agents too untested for field work or soft office agents too posh to leave headquarters.  This is the most danger most of them have ever been in, but they’ve all been trained.  No one jumps when the door at the end of the hall opens, even though Avery feels Terrance swing with him to move to Wills’s side.  They’re in ready position when the figure steps out of the dark, followed by two deep shadows.

“At ease, gentlemen,” M says, and Avery’s breath escapes him in a rush.  Moneypenny and Tanner lift torches of their own behind him.  “It seems I find myself in need of a few agents for a very important mission: search and rescue.  Our target is any MI6 operative still alive in this hellhole.”


	11. Chapter 11

It’s a responsibility he suddenly doesn’t want, each technician that approaches him for advice or cheer or even a kind word lodging a small stone between his bones until he feels too full, too cumbersome to move.  They all want—he can’t help anyone, not even himself.  He wonders how they can’t see that, how they miss the fact that he’s barely treading water.  Something in him is dying for the touch of Bond’s too-big hands on him, something to ground and centre him, but then that want leaves him burning in cold shame.

Bond wants nothing to do with him, has set himself up on the other side of the room to keep watch as Q helps the techs arm themselves to leave.  He lets himself look helplessly at the stern line of Bond’s shoulders and has to stop himself reaching back to press the bruises Bond’s left in his skin; it’s mortifying now to think of how he’d thrown himself—he can’t even finish the thought, face burning.  He busies himself with another pack, another torch and makeshift weapon and another tech queued up by the door, ready.  He’s finished arming them before he quite knows what to do with them all.  They’re as equipped as they’re going to be.

“Double-oh-seven,” he calls, tipping his torch at the man to get his attention.  If his cheeks burn at the call sign, no one need know; he fights down the blush and looks away when the man joins him, tugs at the straps on his own pack because the alternative is pulling at the edge of his jumper like a nervous child.  “I need you on point,” he says instead of any of the other things that are lingering on the tip of his tongue.  _Please forgive me for making things awful between us_ , or _I’m sorry I’m such a child_ , or _I don’t blame you for hating me.  I’m going to fix this_.  It’s melodramatic; Q blames the adrenaline that’s still pumping through his system in the place of blood.

“Of course,” Bond says, and Q doesn’t even let himself wince.  Of course. 

“I’ll follow right behind,” Q adds, but Bond doesn’t seem to hear.  His stomach turns over; for once, Bond being unaware of his feelings is helpful, a mercy.  The techs are silent, obviously frightened as Bond leads them through the door to the emergency stairs, the line of them perfectly straight and single-file, a neat schoolyard queue trailing behind the agent they trust to protect them.  It makes him feel irrationally proud, these technicians—agents—so calm and stoic in their fear.  They’ve achieved great things, and he hopes—

Maudlin.  That’s what he’s being.  He waits until the tail of the line slips through the door, follows with his head through until he sees Bond’s too far ahead to make it back down quickly, the lemon circle of torchlight bobbing at the head of a long snake of dark shadows.  “Sorry,” Q whispers, pulling back into the lab; the door slams, and he can almost hear frightened murmurs beyond the weighted steel as he jams the broom through the handle, barring the door.  It might be his imagination; maybe Bond has led them on and he will end up here alone, lost in the pitch dark when his torch dies.  The thin beam of light is eerie as he sweeps it across the walls; macabre.  He’s being macabre.  Morbid.

“Come out, come out wherever you are,” he calls quietly, but he doesn’t need to play; there’s no game on here.  He knows precisely where R is hiding.

::

It’s remarkable, really, how many of them there are in the building, lost and huddled and streaked with tears.  There have been suicides.  Eve still shudders when her shoes crunch, slide slick in the inky black, and she’s not fooling herself that she’s only clutching Bill’s arm to keep from falling out of stilettos inappropriate for stumbling through the dark, but he’s quiet—kind—and squeezes her hand tenderly when they pass another shattered face, another purpling corpse that they can’t cut down just yet.  The almond scent of cyanide on the air and the sour tang of sick, but still they find people, find hope, find a hand or a foot still moving and a weak voice crying for help.

They’re in rows, now.  Squadrons divided up with a field agent at each head, and there are so many more of them than she could have expected.  It’s hope prickling at her eyes, then, with stinging salt as they guide what’s left of MI6 down, deeper down, until they’re back where it all began—a corpse propped in front of the door and shoes melted to the lino, Barry the security guard face-up and foamed at the mouth, bleeding from the eyes and still.  There’s no power.  The phones don’t work, but after the boys have moved the stiff, cold body of the secretary the doors swing open silent, wordless.

It’s a beautiful night.

“I’m going back,” Bill says, and he’s gentle as he pulls her fingers from his arm, sweet as he pats her and passes her to Mallory.

“No!”  The cry is wounded, sharp and cracked; he turns to her with surprise and she surprises them both: his mouth under hers is dry, a little chapped, and tastes like old beer.  He lets her kiss him, lets her try to express with lips and jaw what words can’t say, and lets her tuck her face into his throat and cry.  “Please, no.  I couldn’t bear it.”

“Eve,” he says, but she knows the name he means, hears it clearly in her head and shivers.  “Eve.”

“I couldn’t bear it,” she repeats.

The door opens behind them and incongruously, it’s the boffins, the Q-Branch techs come pouring out of the belly of the building.  There’s none of them missing—it’s the man’s nerve, she figures sickly, that he can’t get the balls to kill  even one of his closest coworkers—except.  Except Bond comes up pale and bloodless behind them, and she can’t help the hope that rises within her, because if James Bond can survive anything, can save—Bond shakes his head, and something inside her crashes, falls, plummets until she’s dragging breath up from her toes and there’s a rasping sound she only distantly recognises as herself crying.  It’s cold comfort, now, that Bill won’t let her go, eases her carefully to the marble floor before climbing down himself.  It’s cold comfort when Bond has that hard, empty look in his eyes and he stares into the crowd as if maybe he’s still on a mission and he’s—Q—

::

“You’re remarkably stupid,” he says as the door to the server room swings open between them.  “For a clever person.  Are you sure you’re actually clever?  Really?  You can tell me the truth.”

And yes, it’s taunting and childish, but Q looks like a child in front of him, shaking and thin and teeth grit like a stubborn brat.  Here is the man who’s pissed on his plans.  Here is the man who’s thought himself better for years, promoted irrationally ahead of schedule because he was Boothroyd’s favourite, suck-up and toady to half the administrative branch and cocksucker for more than half the Double-ohs—and it had made R laugh to hear him shot down so thoroughly, so quickly and remorselessly when he’d had the nerve to actually ask for it over the communications line.  When he’d had the actual nerve to throw away his career for a quick fuck from Double-oh-seven, as if the man would give a boy like Q the time of day, would treat him with anything less than the complete disdain with which Q treated his own admirers, who fluttered around him like—

Q reels from the blow, and R’s hand hurts before he even realises he’s smacked him.  “Shut up,” R says, because if Q says anything—if he even says a word—but Q stands there, stares at him like Hansel and Gretel realising they’re being left in the woods.  He does nothing, just touches the side of his face that’s going dark in the spooky half-light of the torches between them.  “Aren’t you going to beg?  Well?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to say anything,” Q says, and really quite frankly R has had just about enough of him.  Half R’s age and not even half as clever, still weak and soft-limbed with youth, he’s everything that R has come to hate, though to be fair to Q he half suspects he’s only come to hate it because it’s attached to Q.  He doesn’t even bother to strike him again, just casts a baleful eye at him and knows it won’t do any good.

“Don’t you want to know why?” R asks instead, and this is fun: Q’s face falls, heart on the floor between them as he gets ready to plead, to cry for answers.  The clicking cock of a hammer between his eyes is startling.

“No,” says Q.  “Not really.”

::

He’d beat the door when he’d got there, when he’d pushed his way past the startled technicians frozen like spotlighted deer on the stairs and found the door stuck shut with Q on the other side of it and Bond with egg on his face.  He’d been trying so hard to stay away that he’d missed it.  He’d missed it.

There are tells when an agent is about to do something like this.  They’ll get magnanimous, offer to take rear guard because it’s easier to slip away—Q had put him on point and himself on rear guard, and Bond had missed it like the blindest, most self-absorbed—his mind spins.  They’ll overarm themselves, and Bond thinks back to grenades and bits of string going into a bag.  What they don’t say is that line, the one from all the films—he’d have laughed in Q’s face if he’d heard him say, “It’s him or me,” but here in the bottom of the stairwell with Q locked in the dark with a madman, a murderer, a traitor, it’s not funny.  He puts his shoulder to the door, but the hinges are on the wrong side; he could rough the door all day and get nothing but bruises for his trouble.  He tugs, pulls, braces himself beside the door, but there’s nothing.  It doesn’t budge.

But he’s resourceful.  He wouldn’t be James Bond if he weren’t.  He leaves the techs with the administrators upstairs, barely takes the moment to register Mallory and Tanner and Moneypenny there before disappearing down into the depths of the building again.  He doesn’t have a plan, but Bond is nothing if not a consummate card sharp, a gambler, and he makes his own odds.


	12. Chapter 12

And just like that, it’s over.  Except that it’s not, really; there will be an inquest, a review.  The Ministry will decide whether he’s worthy of keeping his job, of remaining M, the mysterious leader of MI6, and not reverting back to Gareth Mallory, respected for the things he’d lived through over a decade ago and slowly dying of shame from this catastrophe.  The HPA storm the building—sarin; it’s sarin, and the victims were dead hours before anyone could have helped.  They’re setting up decontamination booths in the middle of the street and there are reporters swarming, cracking the scoop that there has been a terrible biological attack here on home soil, one that mimics the horror of the ’07 tube attacks with its suddenness—he realises that it’s probably closer to over for him than it is almost everyone else.  He has failed, horrendously so, at protecting his country, at protecting his people.  He’ll be lucky if he’s not court-martialed.

It’s paper gowns for one and all, over a hundred of the most dangerous servants of Her Majesty’s crown huddled nearly naked under the pop-up tents as they’re hosed down like dogs, dispersing any particles of toxin they may have on them, as their clothes are burned and all Mallory can think of is his tie, a Father’s Day present from Julie.  Margot had looked so fond; Julie’s chubby fingers on his knee—his chest feels tight, and it’s nothing like the times he’s been gassed before, but the HPA agents still swarm, still isolate him and take his vitals as his vision goes dizzy.  It’s all over.

::

He could be frightened, but he finds he’s not.  He’s calm, a type of peace sitting high in his chest as he breathes slowly, in and out, and the end of the gun doesn’t waver.  Q’s known for his marksmanship, at least among Q-Branch, not that marksmanship matters when he can see the indent of the barrel rising from R’s sweat-damp skin when he shifts his grip.  They’re staring at each other, and it suddenly occurs to Q that he doesn’t.  He doesn’t actually care what R has to say, doesn’t want to know why or listen to any taunting, bragging—the idea of hearing him try to explain away the deaths of their coworkers makes his gorge rise, makes his vision white out with anger. 

R laughs, but to Q’s ears he sounds a little nervous.  He sounds unsure.

He sounds like he’s underestimated Q.  It makes it easier.

::

Bond is in the lift’s shaft before he lets himself think about it.  The power’s out and the lifts are still, and he’s not the only one in here—the rude smell of death is thick, and he doesn’t know if it was a jumper or if they’d touched the electrified lines, or if.  Or if they’d had the same thought as he’s had and fallen.  There’s that possibility, he acknowledges.  They might have fallen.

He shouldn’t be here.  Q may have overloaded the breakers, may have deliberately shorted everything electrical in the building, but it’s somehow darker than even the bowels of Q-Branch as he starts to feel his way down the shaft by touch and toe.  He’s headed into a situation he can’t possibly prepare for, tapping down into the belly of a hell that stinks of corpses with nothing more than a torch tucked in his belt and a pistol strapped under his arm, rushing to rescue—but he remembers the soft, sleepy smile Q gave him when he’d woken up on his lap, when they’d both forgotten for a moment the fear and hurt and the distance they were supposed to be putting between themselves.  He remembers Q’s hands in his lapels and the sound when he’d come and the way he shook when he was frightened, and it’s really not a question of whether Q deserves to be saved.  Bond is going to save him regardless, because it’s suddenly a matter of what will happen next, and he won’t shortchange himself like that.  He won’t let this end without an answer.

Q-Branch’s main floors are not the lowest level of the shaft.  There are subfloors, places where poisons and venoms and toxins, explosives and propellants and all manners of dangerous toys are stored.  When he thinks he’s got to the right level, he lets one hand swing free, spins his torch to find the door.  It’s there—the other side of the shaft, four feet down and when he shifts the torch to look for the best grips for his hands it falls with a clatter, illuminating the splatted remains of someone he can’t recognise.  For a long moment he feels vertigo sinking its dizzy claws into the muscles of his shoulders and he wavers, swimming, before he realises that the ambient light is enough, almost enough, to show him where to move.  He has to guess with his hands—the moment he steps, the light is blocked and looking down leaves him moonblind from the prick of light below—but if he’s careful….

There’s a thin ledge at the edge of the door, just half a foot wide and nowhere near enough to stand on, and when he prises the door with his fingertips, it almost doesn’t seem to want to go.  It gives way suddenly, doors gliding open with a wrenching tug, and he finds himself wavering on the edge before falling into the hall.  Without any power he doesn’t need his badge to open the door, and beyond Q-Branch is an empty box; when they’d gone earlier, Q had taken everything of value and put it into his agents’ hands.  There’s not even a match left behind to light the way.

He plunges into the dark.

::

It’s loud, louder in the small room than any sound has any right to be, and normally he wouldn’t—not in the server room where he knows that he’ll have to rebuild something.  But then he realises that the odds are high that he’s lost his job, and not just because of the pistol still smoking in his hand or the blood that’s probably sprayed down his front from the body slumped over his shoes.

“You haven’t got the nerve,” R had said, hands coming up to press the gun closer.  He hadn’t pulled it away.  He’d curled his fingers over Q’s on the trigger, he’d—

He feels like he should vomit.  Distantly, in the back of his head, Q feels like he should be doubling over right now, should be sick on the floor he still can’t see, but he feels—he’s strangely okay with it.  There’s shock, sparkling and cold along his arms and there’s grief, just a little bit, at the things that have happened, and the iron tang of blood in the air is making his mouth and throat feel thick, but his stomach feels fine.  He could even be a little hungry, and the thought hits his funny bone at the precise moment his knees go out from under him, leaving him cackling with laughter against the door, R’s body pressed against his knee.  It’s very, very wet, with blood and more, he knows, but even the thought of R’s staring eyes and empty, shattered face can’t break his laughter, just make it more hysterical until he’s shaking with it.  Until he has to drop the pistol from his fingers—they’ve locked around the handle and he pulls them carefully, one by one, until it falls to the floor—and curl his arms around his middle to hold himself together, to keep himself from flying apart with it. 

The door opens then, and in the familiar footsteps, he recognises Bond.  Bond’s voice, murmuring nonsense words as he’s hefted up to his feet.  Bond pets him in the dark, smears R’s blood across his face because he can’t see it, doesn’t know where the blood has come from, strokes his arms and torso until he reaches Q’s hands and Q realises that he’s been thrumming like a hummingbird, shaking so fine and fragile that he hadn’t noticed.  When he does, the shivers become jerks, nearly seizures, and Bond clutches him close, cups the back of his head, but Q’s eyes are dry.  He’s not going to cry.

“Say something, for the love of God.  Q, say something,” Bond pleads and Q realises his lips have been moving against his ear for minutes now; he tugs himself back, adjusts his jumper though he knows Bond can’t see him.

“I’m fine, Double-oh-seven,” he says, but Bond slams him to his chest again, holds his head still against his shoulder.

“God, Q.  God.”

“I—” he starts, but what is he going to say?  What could he possibly say?

“I heard the gunshot and I thought—God, Q.”

“I killed him.”  The words rise, not precisely what Q wants to say but the only ones that will come to him, and he hears his voice go childish and small.  “I didn’t mean to—didn’t want to, but he—this isn’t my blood.  God, it’s all over me; this isn’t my blood.”

Bond makes soothing sounds in his ear, guides him away from the servers and the corpse and the man Q’s trusted implicitly since before he was Q.  There’s—his face, his skin is sticky with it—R is dead, and Q’s torch is shining on the man’s shiny, polished shoe, and Bond is holding him together because Q is going to go to pieces.  “It’s okay, Q.  It’s okay.”

It’s not.

::

Bill has Eve’s hand tight.  She hadn’t even noticed the HPA agents as they’d worked around them, hadn’t cared that she was revealing her body as they were hosed and redressed and left in a tent with tea and blankets.  None of that matters.  He watches her for signs of panic—they’ve all got signs of panic, but Mallory’s panic attack had surprised even him and he wants her to be safe.  Wants her to move past this, wants her to be as close to normal as any of them can be, as any of them is going to be.  He watches her carefully, and so when they emerge, he sees it on her face before he sees them: her eyes lighting up and her mouth falling into a perfect oh of surprise.

They look awful.  Bond has blood down his front, but Q’s been doused, and no one’s had the heart to tell him there’s something that looks like brain on his shoulder—or else he hasn’t noticed yet.  They both have faces like old parchment, worn and cracking at the edges.  But they’re alive.  They’re alive, and the HPA agents begin to cluster around them, careful against blood-borne pathogens as they’re led off to be inspected, decontaminated.  Bill touches the back of Eve’s hand to his happy smile and she grins back, releasing him for the first time in long minutes to go report to Mallory.


	13. Chapter 13

It’s the incessant beeping that bothers him most, the line that tells his nurses he hasn’t decided to off himself yet today; he’s under watch for it.  For some reason, no one quite believes him when he tells them he’s perfectly okay with having shot a man in the face—it may have something to do with the screaming nightmares.  His doctor asks him again and again if he has someone to talk to at home, friends, family, a lover.  He’s had no visitors; the imposing seal on his medical records keeps them from bringing up the fact that he’d been brought in smeared in the remains of a man with no name, that he has no name himself.  He can say nothing to them, but there’s no one else to talk to, and he’s not certain what he’d say if he had anyone.  He curls into the bed and stares at the cage around the light bulbs intended to keep him from getting a handy bit of glass, as if something so simple could stop him.

::

Avery’s hands are shaking.  It’s almost as if he were the one dosed with one of the deadliest nerve agents on record; Moriah covers his hand with her own thin, twitching one, and smiles.  “I had a dream,” she murmurs softly, the words stretching her mouth into a gentle smile.

“And so did I,” he responds.

“What was yours?”

“That dreamers often lie.”  It takes her a minute to catch the quote and her smile widens.

“You sang to me while I was sick,” she accuses fondly.  His eyes go wide with denial.  “You did!”

“They put you on the good stuff.  I didn’t.”

“You did.  You sang to me,” she hums.  “Oh, little playmate, come out and play with me.”

“I never did,” he says, laughing.  She knows he didn’t, had caught the edges of the world shimmering and known it for a hallucination, but neither of them talks about the truth, about the hours of bad coffee and the desperate clutch of hands the moment she’d been cleared, the way he’d nearly got himself chucked out for threatening the doctor until Tanner had heard the shouting and soothed the situation.  Six’s got a whole floor—not nearly enough room—but these civilian doctors don’t know yet what to make of the agents prowling the hospital anxious and wounded like feral jungle cats.  Avery’s in counseling, he’s said, with housewives whose mums have died from cancer and schoolkids whose classmates overdosed, women whose husbands have stepped in front of trains, and the concept of death—it’s not what bothers him.  Not the concept, not the general _idea_ of death but the specifics, the specific idea that she’d—

“Climb up my apple tree,” she continues quietly, stroking his hand with her fingertips.  They’ll never work together again; her fingers skitter like water droplets on a hotplate, nerves twisted and snarling and singing uneven and shattered and somehow, somehow inexplicably alive.  “And we’ll be jolly friends forever more.”

“God, Trin.”  His mouth is hot, wet with salt and tears, and his hands are shaking as badly as hers.

“Moriah,” she corrects gently.  He looks confused for a moment, then laughs abruptly, face creaking around a grin.

“David.”

“S’a pleasure, David,” says Moriah.

::

Bond hates hospitals, she knows, and she watches him stand this way and that, deciding whether or not to go in.  He turns from the door.

“Just come for the coffee, then?” Eve asks, and Bond lights up, flirtatious.  Familiar.

“It’s good coffee,” he says, sidling closer to her until she laughs, pulling back.

“It’s atrocious coffee.  A form of cruel and unusual punishment.  I never thought I’d miss the coffee deathbots quite so much,” she says, shaking her head.

“Coffee deathbots?”

“It’s how you know when Q loves you,” she confirms, and Bond goes still.  Interesting.  “Or sometimes he just tells you,” she fishes, and the raw snarl of his lip is startling.  She flicks her mind back years and years to a conversation just as the world began to end, to Q’s face when he’d thought Bond was there to speak with him.  There’s an image forming there, something strained and bloody and unmentionably tender.  “You should visit him.”

“You should mind your own business,” he snaps.  Then, “Sorry.”

“You’d better be,” she tells him tartly.  “Leave, then, if you’re not here to visit.  Stop haunting this place with your pretense at guilt.”

“I don’t—”

“If what happened doesn’t bother you, go away.”

The breath leaves his chest as though she’s punched him.  “That’s not fair.  What happened—”

“Does it?  Bother you?  Because it’s what you do, isn’t it?  Go into hostile territory knowing you’re going to die and retrieve an asset.”

“Is he just an asset now?” Bond asks.  His eyes are pale, sharp holes, and she shivers.  Perhaps she’s gone too far.

“You tell me,” she says.  “If you’ll excuse me.”  He flinches when she pushes past.  It’s strangely satisfying.

::

It’s after midnight when he sneaks in, but the room is still hospital-bright, and for a moment he freezes, sure he’s got the wrong room or that Q’s been released and no one’s told him.  It’s well after visiting hours, but he’d been unable to sleep,  Eve’s recrimination spinning in his head until he’d felt trapped in his own skin, unable to think of anything but the thin weight of Q’s body as he’d clutched him after the shooting.  He hadn’t promised anything, still caught in his head and unsure Q would accept any promises, but that hadn’t helped ease the pull between them, the thoughts that waited for him to acknowledge them.  Q is a curl on the bed, one skinny wrist still chained to the rail.  Bond remembers: he’s under suicide watch, on advice from MI6’s psych team, the blue band around his wrist marking him as delicate.

Q’s not delicate.  Even as he rolls in the sheets, sighing and shuffling in his sleep, there’s something dangerous about him.  There’s something dangerous in the way his hand curls and folds on itself against the rail.  Bond can see his eyes moving beneath their lids, mind caught in dreams and thought, a weapon deadlier than any the hospital has taken away from him.  He contemplates the tangled curls, the sweet dip of his spine, the flicker of thick lashes.  Q peers at him muzzily, eyes dusty without his glasses.  Bond assumes they’ve been taken away.

“Bond?  My first visitor, and I almost sleep through it.  Were you waiting until I was sleeping before visiting?” Q asks, and it’s perhaps more than sleep clouding his voice and making it misty; suddenly, Bond doesn’t want to see him.

“I was just leaving,” he says.  Q goes still, quiet, and rolls back over.

“I can pretend I’m still sleeping.  Stay.”

“Q.”

“Stay.  Please.”  And Bond can tell it cost him dear to fit the request into his mouth, can see it in the hunch of his back no longer languid with sleep and comfort.  He sighs, dropping into the visitor’s seat and staring at Q’s back.

“They’ve got you drugged,” Bond says finally.

“Have they,” Q says, voice soft.  “Is it for my protection or theirs, I wonder?”

“You’re on,” Bond freezes, unable to push forward.  “They’ve got you on watch.  To keep you from….”

“They couldn’t stop me if I wanted to,” Q says, and yes, Bond knows this.

“I know.”

“I don’t.  Want to.  I just want to go back to work and put all this behind me.”  Q sounds like he honestly means it, which makes Bond think more than anything he doesn’t.

“Do you—?” Bond asks tentatively.

“They didn’t fire me.  Turns out Britain really likes the idea of being able to lock an enemy into a cage and watch it kill itself.”

“Official story is it was a gas leak.”

“There’ll be conspiracy theories.  There were decontamination stations on the South Bank.”

“Official story.  I think the paps got you covered in blood, too.”

“Mallory’ll have to pay them off, won’t he?”

“After he gets back.  Enforced vacation; they couldn’t publicly fire him over a gas leak, but he’s shaken up.  He’ll be out another month yet.”

“And how many people died?” Q asks.  It’s like the air is sucked from the room; Bond realises he’s holding his breath.  “How many people died because I’m an arrogant arsehole?  How many of our coworkers did I kill by handing that madman such a beautiful weapon?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t you tell me how to feel, Bond!”  Q’s voice is jagged, bleeding; he curls in on himself further until just the tips of his toes peek from the bottom of his pajamas, childhood sweet and hurting.  “I am become death.”

“You _are_ an arrogant arsehole, aren’t you?” Bond laughs suddenly.  “Melodramatic tit.  You think he wouldn’t have done something else?  Wouldn’t have used someone else’s invention?”

“It wouldn’t have been mine,” Q retorts sullenly, but he’s uncurling slightly, the aching line of his shoulders still sore and tight but falling into the bed nonetheless.

“It would have been someone’s,” Bond agrees easily enough.

“Don’t be kind to me,” Q tells him in a voice that’s barely more than a sigh.

“Why not?”

“Don’t, Bond.”

“What if I want to be kind to you, Q?” Bond presses, and a slender hand comes over Q’s shoulder to curl around one of the lines connecting him to the machines in the wall.  A klaxon goes off in a distant room down the hall.

“They think I’ve just made my third attempt.  You should go.” 

“No.”

“Go.”

He can hear footsteps rushing; there will be, perhaps, seconds before the nurses burst in to catch him here.  He can deal with that.  “May I touch you?” he asks.

“Are you asking now,” Q says.

Q’s hair is soft beneath his fingertips, brittle but smooth despite the medicines that keep him docile.  “I’m sorry,” Bond tells him.

“You should be.”

“I am.”  He pets Q; the door bursts open and the nurse looks at him wide-eyed.  “False alarm,” Bond tells her; Q laughs.

“You shouldn’t be—”

“I’ll kill myself if he can’t stay,” Q says, and because he weighs nine stone soaking wet, the nurse believes him, backing away and casting a suspicious look at Bond as if he were the most dangerous man in the room.

“Manipulative brat,” Bond says fondly.

“M’not a child,” Q says.  He’s already drifting back into a drugged sleep.  It’s not—Bond’s not sure where this will go; there are so many things between them, things that will probably never be okay.  He strokes his hand over Q’s curls and Q sleeps.  It’s enough for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic. It’s been a battle as I originally started this fic to deal with issues in my personal life; it’s been on my mind for quite nearly a year now, and it feels very strange to be done with it. My deepest apologies for that huge hiatus; I know it doesn’t leave me with a great track record RE: huge fics or WIPs, but I did eventually finish it?
> 
> Much, much, much love and appreciation goes to everyone who helped me work on it, but especially to my wonderful beta eatingcroutons. I know I’ve been flooding your inbox with compliments, my dear, but the truth of it is that without your help and support and frequent, gentle pickaxing of my Americanisms, this fic would a) not be even half as good as it is; b) be about 1/3rd of the length and probably just one long sentence split up with semicolons; and/or c) nowhere near finished even now. Thank you, my dear, far more than my measly words can say.


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